GNU poke 1.0 released

Version 1.0 of GNU poke is out. "GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them."

From:		"Jose E. Marchesi" <jemarch-AT-gnu.org>
To:		info-gnu-AT-gnu.org
Subject:		GNU poke 1.0 released
Date:		Fri, 26 Feb 2021 11:17:34 +0100
Message-ID:		<87k0qv875t.fsf@gnu.org>
Archive-link:		Article


I am happy to announce the first release of GNU poke, version 1.0.

The tarball poke-1.0.tar.gz is now available at
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-1.0.tar.gz

  GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible
  editor for binary data.  Not limited to editing basic entities such
  as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural,
  interactive programming language designed to describe data
  structures and to operate on them.

This release is the product of 3 years of work resulting in 4126
commits, made by 19 contributors.

The program is far from being perfect and there are known bugs and
limitations in place.  We also have lots of awesome ideas still to be
implemented, extensions we want to add, pickles for many data formats
to write, documentation to improve, and lots of work in
progress... the GUI, the machine-interface... working in poke is so
fun that it is difficult to stop :'D

But it is time to start the releasing cycles so everyone can benefit
from poke, which is already immensely useful for many activities like
systems programming, testing of software, design and documentation of
file formats and protocols, reverse engineering, and much more.
Releasing often will hopefully also bring in more developers to our
little but enthusiastic community... there is so much to do!

In any case, we wish you have fun with poke and that you find it
useful.

Please send us comments, suggestions, bug reports, *patches*,
questions, complaints, bitcoins, or whatever, to poke-devel@gnu.org.

Many of the poke developers and users populate the #poke IRC channel
at irc.freenode.net, and you are more than welcome to join us there
and say hello.

Now it is time to mention the names of all the people who have
contributed with code and/or documentation to this release.  In
certain but no significant order they are:

   John Darrington
   Tim Rühsen
   Luca Saiu
   Bruno Haible
   Mohammad-Reza Nabipoor
   Eric Blake
   Egeyar Bagcioglu
   Kostas Chasialis
   Darshit Shah
   Dan Čermák
   David Faust
   Carlo Caione
   Henner Zeller
   Aurelien Aptel
   Indu Bhagat
   Darkstar
   Michael Drüing
   Pierre-Evariste Dagand

My gratitude to you all!  It is a real pleasure to hack with you.

Finally, as a personal note, I would like to dedicate this release to
my father Eduardo.  For this is also your work in a sense, and I love
you very much.

And this is all for now.
Happy poking!

--
Jose E. Marchesi
Frankfurt am Main
26 February 2021

-- 
If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like
to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package,
see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Feb 27, 2021 15:46 UTC (Sat) by siriusfox (guest, #141084) [Link] (4 responses)

I hope this tool takes the world by storm. If you’ve ever called xxd and wanted to modify a file, this thing is going to be a huge time saver.

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Feb 27, 2021 20:19 UTC (Sat) by larkey (guest, #104463) [Link] (2 responses)

This does look a bit like radare2. It does seem to have been born from a similar motivation as well. I wonder what the big selling point is

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Feb 28, 2021 12:27 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

It reminds me of Kaitai Struct:

https://kaitai.io/

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Mar 1, 2021 13:53 UTC (Mon) by maxfragg (subscriber, #122266) [Link]

Well, radare2 is a reverse-engineering tool, so quite a clear focus, not every looking at binary is reverse-engineering. The selling point of tools like poke certainly is that they are application agnostic.
If you inspect a network-stream, the output of your own tool creating binary files, editing some savegames, there is a lot of places where classical hexeditors are harder to use than necessary, and something where you just tell the editor the memory layout are very useful and save you from having to keep the memory layout all in your head.

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Mar 1, 2021 13:05 UTC (Mon) by sandsmark (guest, #62172) [Link]

Isn't xxd itself intended to be used to edit binary files in vim (by piping back and forth)? It's a part of vim, after all.

But it seems like these kinds of programs are a bit of dime a dozen, even Okteta (the standard KDE hex viewer/editor) has support for parsing/editing structs (xml for simple static structs, and a gcc wrapper to autogenerate xml for new structs, and javascript for more dynamic stuff).

And then more specialized things like Veles that is more focused on analysing completely unknown data with fancy visualizations.

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Feb 27, 2021 17:10 UTC (Sat) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (2 responses)

Now that we have GNU Poke, next we need GNU Peek

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Feb 27, 2021 22:06 UTC (Sat) by wt (subscriber, #11793) [Link]

Isn't that just od? :)

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Feb 28, 2021 19:02 UTC (Sun) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

BEST NAME EVER!

At least from the perspective of someone, like me, that cut his teeth doing BASIC on 8-bit computers.

GNU poke 1.0 released

Posted Mar 26, 2021 11:57 UTC (Fri) by sylou (guest, #119761) [Link]

I wonder what chance such as tool stands against some of the fancy reversing tools we are spoiled with, such as radare2.
Maybe if it's less obnoxious in the syntax...