Redesigning an old Binary File Editor in Pascal.

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 Way back in 1993 I had written a program I called “FileNose” for DOS. It allowed me to search and edit binary files (or just about ANY file) very quickly and efficiently. It had high-speed search, built-in help and a minimal set of features so it was easy for anyone to learn.



The program became quite valuable to me over the years. Unfortunately with the advent of Long File Names and incredibly large files it started to become obsolete.

I had written the program in Borland Turbo Pascal 6. So when Lazarus Pascal finally started to become more popular I checked it out. I was using Fedora Linux at the time and I was surprised to learn you could compile programs for both Linux and Windows (and with a little effort, you could compile for Mac too).


I figured I’d take a stab at re-writing FileNose. Perhaps it would be a great way to learn the new Lazarus IDE.

Not long into my programming venture I discovered the standard “string grid” (used for displaying items in a grid-like fashion) was too slow.



I wanted this program to be at least as fast (in modern CPU terms) as the old DOS program I had written. So I did some research and found I could create my own controls in Lazarus. With the help of the Lazarus support forum I tossed together a simple test control that did something similar to a string grid without all the extra overhead.



I was REALLY impressed with the speed of this new control. It even worked pretty well at full screen mode.

Anyway, now that this issue is out of the way I can focus on the more basic aspects of writing this program.

Unfortunately I’ve had to put this on the back-burner because I business I’m working on requires me to write a simple program to manage customers and invoices. If all goes well I’ll be writing an article about that program too.

Thanks for reading!



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