Many of IDA’s windows have status bars and they contain useful information and functionality which may not be always obvious.
Main window status bar
The status bar at the bottom of IDA’s main window contains:
Autoanalysis progress indicator. See IDA Help: Analysis options for possible values you may see there.
Search direction indicator for “Next search” commands […]
Although nowadays most IDA users probably use the graph view, the text view can still be useful in certain situations. In case you haven’t noticed, it has a UI element which can help you visualize code flow even without the full graph and even outside of functions (the graph view is available only for […]
Navigation band, also sometimes called the navigator, or navbar, is the UI element shown by default at the top of IDA’s window, in the toolbar area.
It shows the global overview of the program being analyzed and allows to see at a quick glance how well has the program been analyzed and what areas may need […]
We covered how to search for things in choosers (list views), but what if you need to look for something elsewhere in IDA?
Hints (aka tooltips) are popup windows with text which appear when you hover the mouse cursor over a particular item in IDA. They are available in many situations.
Although IDA is mostly intended to be used for static analysis, i.e. simply looking at unaltered binaries, there are times you do need to make some changes. For example, you can use it to fix up some obfuscated instructions to clean up the code flow or decompiler output, or change some constants used in the […]
List views (also called choosers or table views) are used in many places in IDA to show lists of different kind of information. For example, the Function list we’ve covered previously is an example of a list view. Many windows opened via the View > Open subviews menu are list views:
Exports
Imports
Names
Strings
Segments
Segment registers
Selectors
Signatures
Type libraries
Local types
Problems
Patched […]
In IDA’s disassembly, you may have often observed names that may look strange and cryptic on first sight: sub_73906D75, loc_40721B, off_40A27C and more. In IDA’s terminology, they’re called dummy names. They are used when a name is required by the assembly syntax but there is nothing suitable available, for example the input file has no […]
You may have come across the menu items View > Hide, Unhide but possibly never used them.
These commands allow you to hide, or collapse and unhide/uncollapse parts of IDA’s output. They can be used in the following situations:
Hiding instructions or data items
To make your database more compact and reduce clutter, you can opt to hide […]
IDA has three shortcuts as an alternative to some menus which could be cumbersome to navigate.
Quick view
Probably the most commonly used, it is triggered by the shortcut Ctrl+1 and shows the items under the View > Open subviews menu.
It can be especially useful for opening views which have no dedicated shortcut such as Notepad (although […]