Layout and Color Schemes

An editor window provides you with a large set of customizable properties, including display layout and coloring scheme. The Layout tab in the Tools » Settings is used to set up these properties.

Configurable Options

Font and Font Size

You can select the font and font size to be used by an editor window. Only monospace fonts can be selected. Hex Editor Neo automatically scans your system for all compatible fonts and presents them in a Font combo box.

Interlacing

It is well known that humans better understand the screen table full of numbers if each odd table's row or column has different background color than even row or color.

Hex Editor Neo supports both row and column interlacing. In addition, it allows you to specify odd and even row/column color separately.

Interlacing provides you with a choice from three options: “Do not interlace background”, “Interlace columns” (the default one) and “Interlace rows”.

Additional Options

A “Draw edit cursor frame” configures whether the editor draws a frame outside the cell being currently edited. This option is ON by default. “Smart indentation” option enables the special feature of Hex Editor Neo, where additional small gaps are inserted between columns to improve readability.

Smart indentation is applied only when the number of columns in a window is a power of 2.

“Antialiased quality” option greatly improves the quality of text on LCD monitors. It also decreases the rendering performance. It is recommended to turn on this option only if you have fast computer and/or graphics card.

Cell Coloring

Cell coloring is widely used in Hex Editor Neo. Such features as cursor, selection, Pattern Coloring, Structure Viewer and Data Inspector all use coloring to highlight important places in a document.

Hex Editor Neo provides the unique color mixing engine, letting all these components to apply coloring to cells without misleading the user. As finally you are the one who specifies all colors for all components, some care must be taken to maintain usability of all these features.

Most components allow you not only to specify the color to be used by some feature/component, but also to apply alpha (or transparency) to it. As long as you have two colors with transparency less than 1 (opaque), these colors mix well. In general, only the “downmost” colors may be (and usually are) opaque. Such things like selection and cursor usually have alpha much less than 1 to provide good mixing.

Color Schemes

Hex Editor Neo allows you to set colors of almost every editor window's element. Select an element in a list and then select a color using color picker control. You can also set the color to “automatic”. The sample window layout below immediately reflects changes you make. Pressing Apply button also immediately applies your current coloring scheme to all opened editor windows. The color of the following elements may be customized:

Text

the color of text in data and text panes.

Background

the color of window background. If interlacing is used, rows or columns use “Even column/row” and “Odd column/row” colors instead. Background color is still used for the rest of the window.

Address

address area text color.

Address background

address area background color.

ASCII/UNICODE text

color of the text in text pane.

ASCII/UNICODE background

text pane background color.

Even column/row (for interlaced modes)

background color for even columns or rows. Used in interlaced modes.

Odd column/row (for interlaced modes)

background color for odd columns or rows. Used in interlaced modes.

“No data” text

text color for the “empty” file data.

Cursor fill

cursor fill color.

Cursor outline

cursor outline color.

Active row & column highlight text

row/column text highlight color.

Active row & column highlight background

row/column background highlight color.

Changed text

text color for changed cells.

Changed background

background color for changed cells.

Changed outline

outline color for changed cells.

Selection

color of selection. Selection color's alpha must allow proper color mixing, so selected data is clearly visible.