How to use the software
KodeByter is relatively simple and straightforward to use. However, if you are struggling to understand and/or use the software this is the right place to be.
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Whether you have social media, a direct messaging service, email, or text/SMS, KodeByter can help you easily encrypt messages so that nobody can decipher them without a Caesar cipher. So if you want to tell someone something that you don't want everyone to understand, KodeByter can do that. It uses a simple algorithm that is very easy to operate and process which makes it perfect for anyone looking for a simple, lightweight program for sending secret messages.
KodeByter is run either by launching the menu shortcut from your application launcher or by running kodebyter through the terminal. Running the program through the terminal will not open a new window, it will just run inside that terminal emulator. Because of this, we recommend that you run the clear command before starting the program via CLI.
Once inside the program, you will see some text that says:
Welcome to Kode Byter!
Press Ctrl+C at any time to exit
Press Ctrl+Shift+C to copy
Press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste
Will exit in 5
Enter message:
If you only see error messages, post your issue in the Issues page so we can sort it out. Now you will need to input your message string after seeing the dialogue:
Enter message
You can either type or press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste copied text from your system clipboard. You will not be able to use the arrow keys to cursor backward or forward as it will leave strange characters behind. If you make a mistake you will need to press the Backspace key to get to the mistake. After the desired message has been entered, press the Return/Enter key on your keyboard to open the "rotation" dialog. In here you will need to enter the "rotation" of the alphabet which will determine how scrambled up the letters are. Refer to the Limitations section for details on hardware limitations regarding integer limits. It is recommended that you don't use multiples of 26 for your encoding/decoding as it will not work. Once you have selected an appropriate rotation integer, press the Return/Enter key on your keyboard. You will see the scrambled/unscrambled message along with the rotation number above. If you were to say "Hello World!" and rotate it 13 times, you'd see:
13
Uryyb Jbeyq!
The number is important to include in any messages with anyone. The reason is that you reverse the number to unscramble the message. So if I wanted to unscramble this, I would enter the message and then do -13 instead of 13.
-13
Hello World!
Note: KodeByter does not scramble numbers. Refer to the Limitations section for more information.
KodeByter, like any other program, has its flaws. Some flaws can be fixed with more code, others cannot.
One major limitation is the lack of cursor keys. Unlike many other programs, KodeByter cannot read cursor keys. It will cause strange characters to appear. For example, if you were to press Cursor Left it would print:
^[[D
This is a limitation of input() in Python itself. It isn't patchable without more unnecessary code which would only make the file size larger with no real benefit.
The next issue is with rotation amounts. This varies depending on which processor you have. So if you were to use an enormous integer larger than what your processor can handle, it will crash. This is also not patchable and will always be an issue. There is still no reason to actually have very large numbers as you can get the same effect with a much smaller integer.
Here is a list of architectures and the ranges they can handle:
08 bit: -128 to 127
16 bit: -32,768 to 32,767
32 bit: -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647
64 bit: -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807
Anything above the maximum, or below the minimum will crash your system depending on which architecture you use. While most people will not be running this on 8 bit or 16 bit systems, but it was still worth mentioning.
KodeByter also will not scramble numbers or characters. While this may be possible, it would be very time-consuming to implement this feature. It could be a future possibility, but likely not. The reason why KodeByter doesn't scramble numbers and characters is that it was only designed to scramble/unscramble ASCII uppercase and lowercase letters. Again, this is not impossible, just very, very unlikely. If you'd like to contribute, write an Issue and post your new code samples and we'll try them out.
