With the Resource Editor you can create and administrate icon resources. An icon resource is a single file which can contain multiple icons in different sizes and different numbers of colors.

You can save a lot of disk space with an icon resource. Each harddisk is divided into sectors. The size of these sectors depends on the size of the harddisk (e.g. on a harddisk with 1 GB one sector has 32.738 bytes). Each file, even if it has only 100 bytes, uses one whole sector. So a normal icon file with the size of 766 bytes actually has 32.738 bytes on a harddisk with 1 GB. If you now have 100 icons this means that they use about 3,3 megabytes of disk space. An icon resource with 100 icons  only needs 100 kilobytes instead. This way you save 3,2 megabytes of disk space!

Windows uses different icons in the different views. For example if you choose 'Small Symbols' in the explorer, Windows uses the 16x16 icon of the programs. If a program doesn't have a 16x16 icon then it resizes the 32x32 icon to this size. You can avoid this by creating an icon resource with different sized icons. This way you also can draw completely different icons for the 'Small Symbols' and 'Large Symbols' views.

 

The interface of the resource editor:

On the top there is a progress bar and below this there is a display where all icons of an icon resource are displayed. On the bottom the name of the current icon resource is displayed. To mark an icon just right click on it. If you want to mark more than one icon use the 'Shift-Key'.

On the right side some buttons are located:

Open Opens an existing icon resource
New Creates a new icon resource
Saving ? Shows how much disk space you are saving with the current resource (if you delete the single files). The shown value is only correct for FAT 16 drives!
Tag All Tags all icons in the current resource
Untag All Untags all icons in the current resource
Extract Extracts the marked icons from the current resource
Delete Deletes the marked icons from the current resource
Exit Quits the Resource Editor