[Feature] Allow for multiple selection in Pattern Data elements

[antoniovazquezblanco]

What feature would you like to see?

Currently, I am able to select one single item in the Pattern data view as follows:

Unfortunatelly, I am unable to select more than one, nor I am able to select one of those big groups of elements.

I would like to be able to click and select multiple elements or groups of elements (at least contiguous).

How will this feature be useful to you and others?

At the moment, I am working with a rather big file, trying to debug some code I've made to create that file.
The problem is that the file contains a very big number of elements and one or more elements towards the end of the file is corrupted...

It is impractical to work with the big file when debugging because of memory constraints. It is also impractical to look at it in ImHex. Hen I apply the pattern file it stops at a certain offset claiming too many elements are present.

I want to be able to split the file into multiple smaller files. I've tryed different utilities but those skip the corrupt parts of the file... I could write my own utility to do this but it would be awesome to be able to do it directly in ImHex, which surely will be useful in more cases...

In order to split the problem, I would love to be able to delete many contiguous sections at once. If I have to delete more than 65536 sections one by one, it is not fun :D.

Being able to select a group and then remove it in the hex view would be awesome!

Request Type

• I can provide a PoC for this feature or am willing to work on it myself and submit a PR

Additional context?

No response

[paxcut]

If you want to select 200 patterns note the start address of the first one and the end address of the last one and enter them in the selection window on the menu. To delete the entire selection use the erase menu entry. When working on data use the data manipulation functionality, not the pattern facilities. SImilarly if you want to manipulate patterns it is better to do it thriugh the pattern data view than directly from the data. Look into bookmarks to help you annotate parts of the data, highlight rules to color them without using patterns, There are also segment delimiters that can be defined from the imhex formatting icin. Use the minimap to get a good overview of the entire file.

[antoniovazquezblanco]

If you want to select 200 patterns note the start address of the first one and the end address of the last one and enter them in the selection window on the menu. To delete the entire selection use the erase menu entry.

Good workaround! I will do that!

When working on data use the data manipulation functionality, not the pattern facilities.

I did not understand that...

SImilarly if you want to manipulate patterns it is better to do it thriugh the pattern data view than directly from the data.

When I perform a selection in the pattern data view, I cannot trigger the Erase action. Enabling that, would also be awesome! New Issue for that... #2502

Look into bookmarks to help you annotate parts of the data, highlight rules to color them without using patterns, There are also segment delimiters that can be defined from the imhex formatting icin. Use the minimap to get a good overview of the entire file.

Thanks, very useful pointers here!

Also, thanks for the quick response!

[paxcut]

By data manipulation i mean what you can access from the edit menu of the hex editor. By pattern manipulation i mean the things you can do to patterns in the pattern data window.

When I perform a selection in the pattern data view, I cannot trigger the Erase action. Enabling that, would also be awesome! New Issue for that... #2502

That is not correct. when you click on the pattern data view the hex editor scrolls to the display of the selection. You delete data from the hex editor context menu. It makes no sense to delete pattern fro m the pattern data window because patterns are not independent of each other so you cannot arbitrary delete a pattern while keeping the rest. if you remove data you need to rerun the pattern to see what new data you have. Say you have an array of 10 patterns. if you remove the one in the middle then you end up with indices that are not sequential and that makes no sense.