GoKawiilBine hex editor adds ASCII-column shading instead of full color highlighting
The developer of the bine hex editor explored adding colorized output similar to Vim's xxd, but found that per-character coloring was too costly under the ncurses-based movwin TUI framework. Instead, bine now uses special block characters (▓ for NUL bytes, ░ for non-printable bytes) in the ASCII column to visually distinguish text from binary data without expensive per-cell rendering calls.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
This shows a practical tradeoff between visual richness and performance when building terminal UIs on top of ncurses, where each additional color call can carry real overhead in Python. The solution highlights how creative reuse of Unicode characters can approximate a feature's benefit without the underlying architectural cost of true colorization.
- Bine is a minimalist hex editor originally rendered in black and white.
- Adding per-byte color highlighting like xxd was too expensive due to ncurses call overhead in Python.
- The developer solved this by using special Unicode block characters in the ASCII column to flag non-printable or NUL bytes.
O'Reilly "Programming with curses" / "NCURSES Programming" book — If this deep dive into hex editors and terminal UIs hooked you, a dedicated ncurses programming book is the natural next step. It walks through windows, color pairs and efficient screen writes""exactly the territory the author is wrestling with in movwin and bine.
See O'Reilly "Programming with curses" / "NCURSES Programming" book on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: movq.de, 2026-08-24
Published there as: “Visualizing Binary Files”
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