Sometimes I need to know if the current instruction sequence belongs to a loop or not. If it does, I'd like to know the loop boundaries. It would be nice to have the current loop highlighted. If the highlight changes as I navigate in the listing, it would be just great.

This is why I created this colorizer plugin. Implementing it turned out to be easier than I thought :) Pretty simple stuff but still useful.

There are no controls, no setup, nothing: the plugin is fully automatic. The listing looks like this with it:

I used only cross-references to detect loops. This allows the plugin to work with any processor. It detects the outermost loop (however I have a feeling that the innermost loop would be better)...

As usual, the source code is available. In fact you have a chance of learning how to write this plugin and similar modules for IDA. We will be learning this and other things in detail during the advanced training held in Columbia, MD, Nov 1-2. If you are interested, send us a message!

Feel free to play with the plugin and improve it!

Download it here: http://hexblog.com/ida_pro/files/color_loops.zip

Posted by Ilfak Guilfanov at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)