Feature Request: Display binary files with hexyl

[casey]

It would be super cool to display binary files with hexyl!

[stefanvanburen]

Maybe you meant to put this on the hexyl issue tracker? :)

[casey]

I meant that bat, when it previews a binary file, should display the contents with hexyl. Should that go on the hexyl issue tracker?

[stefanvanburen]

ah, that makes more sense, sorry - I'm assuming you'd want more than bat --pager=hexyl?

[casey]

No worries! I think that bat --pager=hexyl will pipe all of bat's output through hexyl, instead of just the file contents. Mainly I'd like bat to display binary files somehow, so I don't need to think about if I need bat or hexyl beforehand.

[stefanvanburen]

that would be pretty cool - also, cheers for the just project, I've always been super tempted to use it over make haha

[casey]

Thank you! If there's ever a feature you need that make has and just doesn't, please feel free to open an issue ^_^

[sharkdp]

Thank you for the feedback. That sounds like an interesting idea.

It might make sense to not hard-code this to hexyl, but to introduce BAT_BINARY_VIEWER and to provide a (prioritized) internal list of hex viewers which would be tried in sequence, in case BAT_BINARY_VIEWER is not set. Obviously, hexyl would be on the top of this list 😄 😄

Also, we would need to restrict this to interactive mode (i.e. only call the external program if the output goes to an interactive terminal).

Another thing to think about is whether we should only show a preview of the file (e.g. the first 512 bytes). I could imagine that a lot of bat some-binary-file calls are actually accidents (when using shell globs, for example).

[casey]

It might make sense to not hard-code this to hexyl, but to introduce BAT_BINARY_VIEWER and to provide a (prioritized) internal list of hex viewers which would be tried in sequence, in case BAT_BINARY_VIEWER is not set. Obviously, hexyl would be on the top of this list 😄 😄

If it's parameterized, the --color option should probably also be passed through, although that might be tricky, since not all hex viewers are likely to support a --color option with the same semantics as bat and hexyl.

Another thing to think about is whether we should only show a preview of the file (e.g. the first 512 bytes). I could imagine that a lot of bat some-binary-file calls are actually accidents (when using shell globs, for example).

Is the concern that it would be slow to read the entire file? I suppose this would matter if the user passes --paging=never and hexyl tries to display a giant file.

[sharkdp]

Not quite the same, but I recently added support for viewing binary files via bat -A.

[sharkdp]

With the enhanced -A option in place, I'm not sure if we need this. But we could probably advertise it in the output, instead of just showing

File: whatever   <BINARY>