busybox vi doesn't use ncurses?

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 06:35:43PM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Sunday 11 June 2006 1:31 pm, Paul Fox wrote:
> >  > > We use ansi escape sequences and no curses impl.
> >  >
> >  > Do you know an hexadecimal editor that works with busybox? All those
> >  > I've found need libncurses.
> >
> > i'd look at xxd, or hextools (http://freshmeat.net/projects/hextools/),
> > which are apparently tools that take a hexdump and convert it
> > back into a binary file.  i've never used either one.  i have a
> > simple tool called "unod" which undoes the traditional unix "od -c"
> > format.  if someone knows how to get the busybox hexdump to
> > create that format, then that might be a very small solution (but
> > you'd have to work in octal).
> 
> Good grief, I wrote hex editor for the 1541 disk drive in commodore 64 BASIC 
> when I was 12 years old.  Is there really nothing out there that's at least 
> reasonable?

Writing a good hex editor is not difficult but also not at all
trivial. Keep in mind that you'll likely want to be able to edit HUGE
files (possibly even bigger than address space) or even whole disk
volumes, so the hex editor must keep track of changes in memory (in
some sort of incremental/patch type structure) and demand-load or mmap
regions of the file on disk for editing.

All the *nix hex editors I've seen (a friend was looking for a good
one just a few days ago and we looked all over with no luck) can't
handle anything but very small files and are generally useless
compared the stuff I used on DOS ages ago (like norton diskedit).

Rich