RisohEditor

What RisohEditor does

RisohEditor is a free resource editor for Win32 development, created by Katayama Hirofumi MZ. It can read and write resource data inside RC, RES, EXE, and DLL files, and it supports UTF-16 resource files. The project publishes local documentation pages in several languages, including English, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Portuguese, which points to a maintainer who serves a broad user base. The name Risoh comes from the Japanese word for ideal, according to the project FAQ. For developers working on native Windows applications, a resource editor is the tool that manages dialogs, menus, icons, version info, and string tables that get compiled into an executable or a dynamic link library. RisohEditor positions itself as an alternative to the resource tooling that ships with the Windows SDK and Visual Studio, giving a dedicated editor with its own handling of the resource file formats. The README links to a separate documentation repository for deeper reference material and to a Standardize.md file that describes the project's conventions for resource IDs. A special message compiler called mcdx and a companion manipulator named WonRes round out the author's related tooling for native Windows resource work. The editor handles the resource formats that native Windows builds rely on, and the project documents its conventions for resource IDs so contributed or generated files stay consistent across a codebase.

Platforms and compatibility

The editor runs on a long list of Windows versions. The README states it works on Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10, and on ReactOS, which is a free Windows compatible operating system. That range shows the project's focus on classic Win32 desktop development rather than only the newest Windows releases. A FAQ entry confirms the tool supports 64 bit builds, so it is not limited to 32 bit resource files. Another entry explains the difference between the installer build and the portable build: the portable version avoids the registry and stores settings in an ini file instead. On the question of compiler behavior, the FAQ notes that rc.exe correctly supports UTF-16, but before Visual Studio 2022, loading a UTF-8 file could produce garbage in the output data, and it recommends Visual Studio 2022 or later. There is also a special message compiler called mcdx that the author made, documented in a MESSAGETABLEDX.md file, and a companion manipulator named WonRes that can load, save, encrypt, and decrypt Win32 resource data. These sibling tools show a small ecosystem built around the same low level PE resource formats that RisohEditor itself edits. The FAQ also explains what the standard control ID macros such as edt1 and cmb1 mean, which helps newcomers map dialog controls to the constants the Windows API expects.

Licensing and support

RisohEditor's license is described in a LICENSE.txt file in the repository, which the README points to for the full copyright and license terms. The project is presented as free, and the documentation site and translated pages make it accessible to developers who do not read Japanese or English. Support takes the form of the FAQ in the README, which answers practical questions such as what the standard control ID macros edt1, edt2, and cmb1 mean, what mcdx is, and why garbled characters can appear when compiling with older Visual Studio versions. Contact with the author is available by email. Because the tool deals with low level PE resource formats, accurate handling of encodings matters, and the UTF-16 support plus the UTF-8 caveat for older Visual Studio are the kind of detail that matters to someone shipping a localized Windows application. The project's staying power across many Windows releases suggests a narrow but stable niche: developers who maintain or reverse engineer native Windows binaries and need a dependable editor for their resource tables and dialogs. The availability of a portable build also helps on locked down machines where writing to the registry is restricted or unwanted by the user. It runs on Windows XP through 10 and ReactOS.

Editorial conclusion

RisohEditor is published by Katayama Hirofumi MZ and, at the time of writing, the repository recorded 515 stars and was last updated on 2026-08-24.