Leave these tips on for a while. They will tell you things that are not immediately obvious when using HexEdit and will save you from having to read the on-line help.
You can toggle between insert and overtype modes by double clicking the INS/OVR indicator on the status bar.
You can quickly search for a sequence of hex values using the Find Tool on the Edit Bar. Press F6, or click the tool, type the hex digits and press Enter to start the search.
You can open two windows on the same file with the Window/New Window menu option.
Ctrl-Z is the keyboard shortcut for undo. It not only undoes editing changes made to the file but also movements of the cursor, selections, and even changes to the format and state of the display.
You can bring up the properties dialog by double clicking the "byte values" indicator (Hex, Decimal, Octal, Binary, Character segment) of the status bar.
The HexEdit icon is supposed to look like the word "HeX" spelt using tools (screwdriver, chisel, spanner and pliers).
To search for a string using the Find Tool on the Edit Bar type an equals sign (=) and the characters to search for (or press F5). Use a tilde (~) for case-insensitive searches (or press F4).
You can easily determine the distance between two parts of a file by setting the mark at one end and moving the cursor to the other. The "Distance to Mark" indicators (hex and decimal) of the status bar show the distance.
Ctrl-U and ctrl-D are keyboard shortcuts to scroll up and down by one line.
Remember when using signed numbers: 2's complement, 3's a crowd.
To open a contiguous group of files in the File Open dialog: click on the first one and shift-click (hold down the shift key while clicking with the mouse) on the last. To select individual files use control-click.
You can scroll through the history of previous search strings in the Find Dialog using the up and down arrow keys.
The "Flip" menu options reverse the byte order of the bytes following the current cursor position. For numbers this flips between big-endian and little-endian formats.
You can drag the Tool Bar and Edit Bar anywhere on the screen or dock them at the top or bottom of the HexEdit main window. Unfortunately, you can't resize them or dock them on the left or right (yet).
When you are viewing in EBCDIC mode, string searches (case sensitive or insensitive) are performed using EBCDIC characters.
To automatically view information about the values at the current cursor location (decimal, floating point values etc) as you move within and edit a file, leave the Properties dialog open.
You can toggle between read-only and read-write modes by double clicking the RO/RW indicator on the status bar.
You can't change the default font used when a new window is opened (yet) from Courier 12. You can change the font once the window is opened.
In the Find dialog "ASCII" really refers to the native 8 bit character set, which includes "graphic" and other characters which have their high bit set. Depending on the current font this is usually the ANSI character set (a superset of ASCII).
The Control Characters button on the Tool Bar toggles between 3 states. Control characters can be displayed as red dots, as their corresponding uppercase ASCII character (char 0 = @, char 1 = A, etc), or as a C/C++ escape char (char 0 = 0, tab = t, etc).
You can compare different parts of the same file by opening two windows on the same file, positioning the cursor in both windows and pressing Alt-C.
The Increment Byte and Decrement Byte (keyboard shortcuts are the + and - keys on the numeric keypad) are often useful in keystroke macros.
If an ASCII text search fails in a DLL or EXE file try clicking the Unicode button of the find dialog and searching again. (Many Windows programs store text as Unicode rather than ASCII.)
Ctrl-L will scroll the display so that the cursor is in the centre of the window. It will also completely redraw the window in case it has been messed up by another program.
To automatically open a file when you run HexEdit place the file name on the HexEdit command line. You can even open more than one file using wildcards. For example: HexEdit *.EXE *.DLL.
The Find dialog provides a simple way to convert between EBCDIC and ASCII. Select the Hex radio button and type the ASCII value, then select the ASCII radio button to convert to the corresponding ASCII display char, select EBCDIC and then select Hex to convert to the EBCDIC value.
You can quickly cycle through all windows (that are not minimised or in print preview) using F2.
The Hex and Decimal Address Tools on the Edit Bar provide a simple way to convert between hex and decimal. Type a number into one and the corresponding hex or decimal value appears in the other.
HexEdit does not provide a "find and replace" command. However, you can easily do this using a keystroke macro.
When you undo editing changes to a file, all undo information in other windows (cursor movement etc) back to that point is lost.
If you insert or delete bytes within a file the whole file will need to be copied when you save it. On a large file this may take a very long time and require a lot of disk space. To avoid this do all editing in Overtype mode (and don't create a backup file).
You can quickly change a case-sensitive search to a case-insensitive search in the Find Tool on the Edit Bar by changing the equals sign (=) at the start of the string to a tilde (~).
When comparing windows, tile the two windows vertically first (Window/Tile Vertically) to easily view the differences.
Each window has its own read-only/read-write attribute. This allows you to edit one part of a file while viewing another part, without accidentally making changes in the wrong window.
During a long search the Hex and Decimal Address Tools on the Edit Bar are regularly updated so you can see how the search is progressing.
After you save a file all undo information is lost. (The technical reason is that HexEdit stores the changes made to the file as part of its undo stack.)
The Win 95 print dialog cannot handle more than 32767 pages. To print the end of a large file, select what you want to print and choose the print selection option in the print dialog.
You can paste bytes cut from HexEdit into NotePad or other text editors and word processors but any null bytes (value 0) will be removed.
Use Ctrl-Shift-End to select everything from the cursor to the end of file. Use Ctrl-Shift-Home to select to start of file. Ctrl-A selects the whole file.
Searching is performed using the fast Boyer-Moore algorithm. Due to the nature of the algorithm the longer the string of (unique) search bytes you enter the faster the search will be.
Comparing windows is only allowed if there are just two non-minimised windows, OR there are only two windows open (minimised or not).
To convert a text search string to the corresponding ASCII (or EBCDIC if EBCDIC mode is on) hex values just delete the starting = or ~ in the Find Tool on the Edit Bar.
If you undo editing changes in one window, all non-editing changes (cursor movement, format changes etc) in the other windows for the same file will also be undone. This is necessary to keep the file and the undo information consistent.
This is the last tip. You will now begin to see the same tips again. (If you want to add your own tips put them in HexEdit.tip.)
