Crashing in crash recovery

[zyga]

I was working through a profile that crashed during typing of "\x (I was trying to write "\x00") and the result crash recovery crashed again, forcing me to wipe state.

While I understand that crashing is unavoidable sometimes, I wonder what could be done to allow the user to save the pattern and reset somehow.

Thanks for making ImHex, it's really useful for what I do! :)

[WerWolv]

Hey! Please send me your pattern if the crash is reproducible, it would be great to fix that issue.

As for your question, when ImHex crashes, all it does is create a new project file containing the current state and saves it to <imhex path>/crash_backup.hexproj. That project file can be loaded without any further changes using the File -> Project -> Open Project... option. So one possibility would be to add some sort of Save last project as... option to the crash popup that shows up after the restart.
Our project files are ultimately just .tar files so to just get the pattern out of them, it's possible to open the file with 7zip for example.

[paxcut]

I can reproduce the crash on an older version (not sure which one was yet) by typing "/ but on 1.36.2 it does not crash. What version are you on?

[zyga]

I'm on the flatpak version which seems to be latest (1.36.2)

[paxcut]

I have tried every version I could find and the crash is not happening anymore. It must be very version specific or maybe the crash only happens under certain conditions. All my logs at the time of the crash are sized 0.

About the crash recovery crashing it should not matter if it does as long as you know what causes it and you can avoid repeating it. The recovery is actually just a project file that you can make a copy of and save elsewhere for safe keeping or else it will be overwritten by new files . Once you have the file saved wit a different name in another folder you can try opening it over and over or extract its contents and load them into a new project.

[zyga]

I think this part is key, ideally the pattern text could be saved in plain text to recover. I now learned and do this manually but I think that was most frustrating aspect of discovering crash-during-recovery.

[paxcut]

You are right but in general there is more than one pattern text file in a project so that approach would need some thinking on how to deal with that fact. I think part of the reason that tar was chosen as the format to store projects is that it makes no attempts to encode or compress text files and saves them as plain text so that even if you are unaware of using 7z, opening them in a text editor makes all of the textual content readable and copy-paste-able.

Maybe we could include a small readme file in the folder that contains the crash recovery files with the basics of manual recovery in the cases where automatic recovery fails to save your work. Then when ImHex determines that the previous session crashed and asks if the recovery file should be loaded there could be a short message indicating that possible manual recovery steps can be found there.

Alternatively if a crash recovery fails to load, instructions on manual recovery could be displayed instead of the standard error.

Any further suggestions you may have on how to improve the current state are most welcomed.