The Normal View

This view window is set to the 'normal' view:

The 'Normal' view is the usual hex editor interface. On the right of the raw hex, there's a column that shows the character values of the bytes. AXE does, however offer a few enhancements; clicking on the header of the right hand column will toggle it between Unicode, EBCDIC and ANSI characters. The TAB key can be used to switch the edit focus between the raw hex and the characters; you can type normally into the characters column. Use the 'Insert' key to toggle Insert/Overstrike modes.

When the hex column is resized by dragging the divider in the header, the row length of the view changes, and thus the width of the 'characters' column changes.

When cutting and pasting text into and out of the right hand column, AXE will try to use Unicode (i.e. UCS2) text if the right hand column is set to Unicode. Otherwise the system's default encoding will be used. For instance, if you paste some text into AXE from Internet Explorer and your view is set to Unicode, you will paste in the bytes that are the UCS2 representation of that text. If your view is set to ANSI, you will paste in the Shift-JIS representation of the text (which will not be easy to read in AXE but might still be useful).

The grey divider between the two columns doesn't do anything; the view just looks ugly without it.

Right clicking on the Offsets column will allow you to define a new structure based on the row you clicked. Right clicking on the Bytes column allows you to set bookmarks.