RSoC 2019 Final: Console Interface Improvements
I successfully completed RSoC and will be presenting my work remotely (Didn’t get the VISA :( ) in R2Con, Barcelona. The list of things I got to do are:
Introduction:
Hello all, I’m deepakchethan from India. I got to work on the console interface improvements for radare2 as a part of 2019’s edition of Radare Summer of Code. My main task was to improve the terminal interface of radare2. As a part of which I was tasked with completing 6 main tasks. I was unable to complete the table API myself, gladly pancake helped me with implementing the Table engine, while I worked on the integration and various improvements of it. I learned a lot in the 3 months and am very grateful to my mentors Pancake and XVilka for being flexible and supportive in all aspects of the program.
Radare2 already had vim-like autocompletion in the visual offset prompt. My job was to generalize it and integrate it with the RCons. This feature can be enabled by setting scr.prompt.popup. It is still a little buggy but the result is as follows:
Task 2: Improving autocompletion and dietline modes (vi/emacs-like hotkeys)
Autocompletion was not supported for k and other mount based commands. I was tasked to add them. I also integrated dietline into mount shell (ms) and HUD mode.
I added the missing emacs hotkeys and added vi modes, which can be enabled by setting scr.prompt.vi to true. As a bonus if you set scr.prompt.mode to true, the color of the prompt changes based on the vi mode (control/insert). See the exact list of the hotkeys in Dietline Radare2 book chapter.
I also added support for some bash commands like uniq, sort, join, etc.,
Task 3: Support color-scheme in radiff2 graphs
My next task was to add support for ASCII/Unicode graphs for radiff2. But I noticed that the agd-based diff commands were not implemented in radare2. So I began with that, once it was complete, exporting them to radiff2 was relatively simple. Now, radiff2 supports all these graph outputs:
- ASCII or Unicode (UTF-8) art
- r2 commands
- Graphviz dot
- Graph Modelling Language (GML)
- JSON
- JSON with disasm
- SDB key-value
- Tiny ASCII/Unicode art
- Interactive ASCII/Unicode art
The generated ASCII diff graph between true and false:
Task 4: Further improvements for UTF-8, BiDi:
All the reflines in disasm were of the same kind, which was a bit confusing. So I added different colors for up and down going reflines. The new look:
I also added UTF8 support for line graph commands like p= and p==.
Task 5: Implement table commands and API (like it is done for graphs)
I was not able to implement the table API, but pancake did it. So I was tasked to add UTF-8 support and integrate the table API in the various commands that will benefit from the table representation. The p-h command integrated with the table API looks as follows:
Task 6: Various bugfixes and improvements for visual, visual panels and graph modes
I fixed quite a bunch of bugs and all of these can be found here.