Working with Branches
In most other applications, phantom operations are always silently deleted when you execute new operation.
Hex Editor provides the unique feature, called history branching, which is used to retain the phantom operations at the time new operation is executed.
Imaging you have a following operation history:
Now you execute the Edit » Undo command twice, effectively undoing two last operations. Note that operations are not deleted, they became phantom operations and are displayed in gray color in an operation list:
Now you execute another operation. This is a point where most programs silently discard two phantom operations and you lose the document state they provided you with. Hex Editor creates a branch, retaining states provided by two phantom operations:
Now you can switch to the branch, by clicking on an operation in it. Operation switching always has constant-time complexity in the Hex Editor. You can now continue working with any of two branches, add new operations to any of them, create new branches and so on.
You can also exchange data between operations from different branches via Clipboard.