Updated: Sun, 2006-09-10 20:12

AXE is a hex editor -- the name stands for Advanced heX Editor, and even though it's an oldish bit of software there are some things it does well that nothing else does at all.

AXE is used wherever data exists that should have its own editor but doesn't -- there are many users in medicine, telecoms, and aerospace but I strongly suspect that editing game save files accounts for a high proportion of use.

As the current maintainer of AXE 3.* and main developer of the long-awaited AXE 4, I've tried to put together a few articles here that answer common questions and throw a little light on the state of AXE4.

Generally, if you have something to say (and I'm always grateful when you do) it's better to leave a comment on these pages than to use the jBrowse site or the feedback form within AXE itself. In fact, I'm going to work on importing the feedback from the form into this site.

Despite this, please note that I am just one person who happens to work on AXE, rather than the Voice of the AXE Project. Actually, it doesn't have a voice...

AXE Community

Updated: Sun, 2007-02-25 18:00

Ok, well...

The AXE site at http://www.jbrowse.com had been languishing for quite a while, and the polls and feedback features had stopped working.

The AXE site itself has now been moved to http://axe-editor.com, but in its new home it no longer has any polls or feedback forms.

I've therefore moved the polls and those comments that were easiest to retrieve (i.e. those from early 2006, as luck would have it) to hwacha.net.

I've also created some polls that duplicate the contents of the original AXE poll (at least, the more useful sections).

Current State of AXE 4

Updated: Sat, 2006-09-30 20:36

For the curious, here is the current state of AXE 4, as I see it right now. By right now, I mean September 30th, 2006.

It would be nice if I could answer the question 'how near is it to being done?' However, that's impossible because I don't know everything that will go in it, and I don't know everything that will have to be redone -- it seems to me that a few things could benefit from being done in native code rather than C#.

So, all I'm trying to do here is give an idea of what has been accomplished. The long half of the journey, I'm afraid, is yet to come. Currently, most of the work is going on the GUI. Enough basic functionality has been done that documents can be loaded and edited, and now a great deal of GUI infrastructure is required before advanced features are added.

AXE 4 Questions

Updated: Wed, 2006-09-20 16:40

Concerning the Development of AXE 4

AXE 4 has been under development (mainly by me) for quite some time and to be honest it will continue under development for quite some time to come. There is an awful lot of code in AXE and even a straight port would be difficult; a complete rewrite in C#, with a very different approach to optimization and scalability than the original AXE, is a huge task. I'm in no hurry.

Why .NET?

I'm really not interested in discussing the merits of .NET in general. So, talking about AXE specifically...

AXE 3 is written in MFC. MFC is dead. MFC is also very very difficult. At the time AXE was made, MFC was the best performing and most flexible GUI toolkit in the world, but life is simply too short to plunge into the hell that is MFC again.

AXE FAQs

Updated: Wed, 2006-09-20 16:06

AXE Hex Editor FAQ

Over the years, there have been hundreds of questions asked about AXE by email, but there has never been anywhere to actually express the answers to these questions or generate discussion. Unfortunately, the existing AXE site seems unlikely to move in that direction in the immediate future so I have collected together the most important question here.

These questions refer to the current version of AXE, 3.4. There is really no reason to use 3.0 through 3.3 any more. AXE 4.0 development is dealt with in a separate page here.