With EditPad Pro you can instantly switch between text mode and hexadecimal mode to conveniently edit binary files as well as text files containing non-printable characters. Just like a dedicated hex editor, EditPad Pro’s hex mode shows byte offsets at the left, hexadecimal representation in the middle, and textual representation at the right. You can edit the file in both the hex section and the text section. EditPad Pro keeps them automatically in sync.
Editing binary files with EditPad Pro is perfectly safe, even in text mode. If you open a file and save it under another name, you will get an identical copy. A file’s contents are only modified if you take action to edit the file.
Many text editors cannot properly handle binary files. If you open a file and save it under another name without taking any other action, the new file is likely to be different from the original. That’s obviously not good. Typical problems are non-printable characters that “disappear” and line break characters that are altered as the text editor tries to interpret them. EditPad Pro does try to interpret line break characters in text mode, but maintains the file exactly as it was. You can always check this by switching to hexadecimal mode.
Use EditPad Pro’s search and replace functionality in hexadecimal mode as you do in text mode. The search and replace boxes will switch between text and hex mode along with the main editing area.
EditPad’s copy-and-paste intelligently changes its behavior depending on whether the cursor is in the hexadecimal section or ASCII section. You can directly copy and paste the hexadecimal representation as well as the actual bytes.
EditPad Pro’s handy Byte Value Editor makes it easy to change values spanning one, two (word), three, four (dword), six or eight (qword) bytes. When the Byte Value Editor’s pane is visible, it will automatically interpret the bytes after the text cursor as signed and unsigned integers of all six sizes, and as floats of three sizes, all represented in decimal. Change any of the values in the Byte Value Editor to replace the block of bytes with an integer or float representing the new value.
The Byte Value Editor supports both the “little endian” byte order used by Intel-compatible CPUs, and the “big endian” byte order used by the PowerPC CPUs that used to power Macintosh computers. File formats originating on the Mac often still use the big endian byte order. EditPad Pro’s hex editor edits them all.