Hex Editor Neo Edition Comparison

Basic File Editing

Basic file editing include writing to file (direct file modification), inserting data to a file, deleting data from a file, inserting another file, working with clipboard, positioning within a file, changing file's size, filling file's data.

Replace

The Replace command is used to locate a specific pattern in a file and replace it with another pattern. The Find & Replace Dialog is used to specify both patterns, as well as a number of additional options. It is not required that the size of the search and replace patterns equals, in addition, the replace pattern may be empty. In the latter case, found pattern occurrences are removed from the document.

When you press the Replace button for the first time, Hex Editor starts searching for a pattern. When pattern is located, the cursor is moved to the beginning of the pattern and a Find & Replace Dialog is displayed again. Now you have a choice of pressing Find Next button to skip this match and search for another, or Replace button to replace this match and continue searching.

The direction of the next search is governed by the "Search up" or "Search down" option.

When there are no more matches, the message box is displayed.

See the Replace section for more information.

Operation History Saving & Loading

The entire operation history may be compressed and saved to a disk file. It then may be loaded and applied to the same document, effectively restoring all states and branches.

See the Working with History section for more information.

Patch Creation

A patch is a difference between two states of a document. In most cases the size of this difference is much smaller than the size of the file itself. Hex Editor supports creating a special patch file, which contains all modifications made to an opened document. The patch can subsequently be distributed and applied to the same file resulting in the same modifications being made to a file.

Hex Editor does not support applying patches in its framework. Instead, the separate application, PatchApply.exe is provided for this purpose. Alternatively, Patch API provides several other methods of applying patches.

See the Creating Patches section for more information.

Customizable User Interface

Hex Editor is a highly customizable application. You can customize almost every feature or module. You can customize toolbars, keyboard shortcuts, the placement, layout and color schemes of editor windows, a list of directories that are used to search for included files and an associations between a structure scheme and file extension.

In addition, most interface dialogs, especially those that encapsulate a Pattern Dialog, allow you to change their size. The size is then saved and restored next time you use this dialog. Most dialog's fields also store the values you entered into them and provide you with a list of last recently used values.

See the Customization Overview section for more information.

File Attributes Tool Window

The Attributes Tool Window displays the current file's attributes. It also allows you to modify the state of some attributes.

See the Attributes Tool Window section for more information.

History Purge

History Purge provides you with four ways of purging an operation history:

• Clear history - all operations in a history are deleted. The document state is NOT changed, all modifications are "merged" into the single operation, which becomes an operation list root.
• Purge redo tail - all phantom operations (or operation tail) are dropped and removed.
• Purge branches - all branches except the current one are dropped and removed.
• Purge all - remove all operations except the very first one. In most cases (if Clear History command was not used), this root operation is "Open" or "New".

See the Working with History section for more information.

Multiple Selection

The unique multiple selection concept is used throughout the Hex Editor. A multiple selection is a collection of contiguous ranges. Such selection may arise as a result of user's action or as a result of executing a command. All Hex Editor's commands and modules fully support multiple selections and work with them in a very efficient way.

See the Multiple Selection section for more information.

Find All

This extremely powerful command locates all occurrences of specified pattern. The Find Dialog is used to specify the pattern to search for, as well as a number of additional options.

The result of the Find All operation is a multiple selection, which describes all pattern occurrences. Selection Details window may be used to browse results. In addition, message box with a total number of occurrences found is displayed when searching finishes.

If the pattern has not been found in a file, the message box is displayed.

See the Find All section for more information.

Base Converter

The Base Converter Tool Window provides you with a mechanism to convert numbers from one format into another.

The following formats and encodings are supported by the Base Converter:

• Decimal
• Hexadecimal
• Octal
• Binary
• Float (single-precision floating-point number)
• Double (double-precision floating-point number)
• ASCII character
• UNICODE character
• EBCDIC character

Once you enter the value in one of the supported formats, it gets immediately converted into other compatible formats.

See the Base Converter Tool Window section for more information.

Bookmarks

A bookmark is a stored location within a document. Bookmarks may be used to quickly navigate through the document.

Hex Editor supports creation of several bookmark groups. Each group holds an unlimited number of bookmarks. You can specify different coloring schemes for different bookmarks. The Bookmarks Tool Window is used to display and manage all bookmark groups and their properties.

See the Bookmarks Overview section for more information.

Built-In Explorer

Hex Editor provides two Windows Explorer-like windows as part of its user interface. They can be used to perform usual file and folder operations and also tightly coupled with Hex Editor. For example, you can open files in the editor by double-clicking them in the Explorer window simply dragging them to the editor's window.

Standard Edition unlocks the Built-In Explorer window. Professional Edition adds the second Explorer window to the user interface.

See the Built-In Explorer section for more information.

Advanced Copy & Export (Raw Text Format)

Selected document data may be converted into a number of supported text formats and placed into the Clipboard or exported to a file. Space-separated or comma-separated numbers, raw text with selected encoding, programming language array declaration, Base64, UUencode and Quoted-Printable are among supported formats.

Raw Text Format allows you to copy the selected data from the text pane "as it is". You also have an option to specify the text encoding (from the list of more than 150 encodings, including multi-byte).

See the Advanced Copy & Export section for more information.

Pasting Text

Text may now be pasted into the editor. Depending on the active pane, the text is either pasted "as is" (if the text pane is active), or parsed as a sequence of hexadecimal or decimal integers (if the code pane is active).

See the Pasting Text section for more information.

Opening Physical Disks

Hex Editor Neo supports opening physical disks for viewing and editing.

See the Opening Disks section for more information.

Opening Computer Physical Memory (RAM)

Hex Editor Neo provides a read-only view into the computer physical memory (RAM) - only on supported operating systems.

See the Opening RAM section for more information.

Data Operations

A large set of data operation (bitwise: NOT, OR, AND, XOR; arithmetic: Negation, Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Remainder; and different shifts) are provided.

See the Data Operations section for more information.

Structure Viewer

Structure Viewer interprets document's data according to some structure definition. A structure is an ordered set of fields, each of which has defined type. A type may be a built-in type or another structure.

Structure Viewer allows you to bind structure definition to a given position within a file and analyze file's data according to a structure definition. In addition, you may use parsed fields to modify data in a document.

See the Structure Viewier Overview section for more information.

Connecting Editor Windows

You can connect two editor windows with each other. This synchronizes cursor movement in both windows, which is an extremely useful editing technique in some scenarios.

Replace in Files

The Replace in Files command is used to search a list of files for a specified pattern and replace it with another pattern. You specify the list of folders and file mask that determine the list of files and you enter both patterns to search in a Find in Files Dialog. The "Find and replace mode" switch must be enabled for this command.

Replace in Files function operates in one of two modes: Replace all occurrences and save and Replace all occurrences and open.

The implementation of Replace in Files command scales well, that is, it works faster on multi-core or multi-processor computers. Several dedicated threads of execution are launched on such computers and perform searching and replacing in parallel.

See the Replace in Files section for more information.

Built-In Explorer (Second Window)

Hex Editor provides two Windows Explorer-like windows as part of its user interface. They can be used to perform usual file and folder operations and also tightly coupled with Hex Editor. For example, you can open files in the editor by double-clicking them in the Explorer window simply dragging them to the editor's window.

Standard Edition unlocks the Built-In Explorer window. Professional Edition adds the second Explorer window to the user interface.

See the Built-In Explorer section for more information.

Checksum Calculation

Hex Editor supports 16 checksum calculation algorithms, including MD5, SHA-1, CRC-16, CRC-32 and others. Custom CRC algorithm is also provided. You can compute the checksum for the whole file or for the current (multiple) selection. Several checksums may be computed at the same time. Results are easily exportable and copyable to the Clipboard.

See the Checksum Calculation Overview section for more information.

Find NTFS Streams

Hex Editor provides you with a powerful feature that allows you to locate all files (according to a given criteria) that have alternate data streams in them. It can also be used to quickly calculate a total space occupied by streams on your disk. Found streams may then be opened in the editor or deleted.

File Document Scripting

Hex Editor provides a programming interface to its basic file editing features. The interface provided by the Hex Editor may be used by any code written in any automation-compatible language.

Two objects, File Document Object and Multiple Selection Object are provided by the application. User code can create these objects, call methods they expose and query/set their properties. As a result, it may achieve the same functionality as provided by the Hex Editor's user interface, with same performance characteristics. Hex Editor's window does not appear on the screen when any of exposed objects is instantiated.

See the Scripting Overview section for more information.