UPDATE (09/26/2007):

There are two brand new, desktop-based Registry editors:

1. SOTi's brand-new, 6-series of their highly recommended Pocket Controller received a fully-fledged Registry Editor (see THIS)
2. There is another, free editor called CeRegEditor. See THIS for more info.

UPDATE (05/03/2007):

As far as WM5/WM6 compliance is concerned, the desktop-based Mobile Registry Editor can NOT write to anywhere / modify anything except values under HKCR. That is, you can't use it for modifying anything (except for, again, HKCR). Unfortunately, while the author has been promising the new, 1.2 version of the app for a year, it still hasn't been released.

In the meantime, there are two major releases worth mentioning, also sporting a built-in registry editor:

1. DotFred / FdcSoft's Task Manager: a FREE, highly recommended, excellent all-in-one tool
2. the 3.x series of SKTools also has a pretty good registry editor. You definitely want to give it a try.

The Ultimate Roundup of Registry Editors for the Pocket PC

My previous reviews of Registry Editors (regeds for short) certainly lack a comparison chart and some other (not that known) registry editors, not to speak about its being spread over several posts/threads. This is why I've decided to retest all the registry editors, take screenshots of all dialogs and come up with a decent comparison chart of them to make your choice even easier.

Note that I've tested all these editors and, therefore, found a LOT of bugs that have never elsewhere been written about. Therefore, you should read this article even if you have already settled for one of these regeds - you will find a lot of new information, warnings and tips.

If you don't have a registry editor, you should consider getting one. There're a lot of functionality you can't otherwise activate on your Pocket PC. Sure, there're tools like Tweaks2k2, CETuner 2005 (see this (alternative here) article for a direct, comparison chart-based comparison of these two apps, feature-wise), SKTools, MemMaid etc. for system hacking, but they're all commercial programs and not necessarily contain all the known registry hacks - not even the best and most powerful Tweaks2k2. For example, the community and, last but definitely not least, I always come up with newer and newer, never before known/published registry hacks - see for example "How to store Messaging/Inbox mail attachments on a storage card?" (alternative here), "How can I display more than four matching words when I enter text into the PPC?" etc. -, and may take a while for them to be also implemented in Tweaks2k2. Not to mention non-system hacks - there're plenty of them and you must enter them yourself into the Registry. Finally, there're things not any of them will be able to do; for example, none of them offer the same easiness of switching between the desktop and PDA identification of PIE; see for example this article (alternatives: PPCT, AximSite, PPC Magazine, FirstLoox, BrightHand) and my roundup of PPC Web browsers (alternatives: iPAQ HQ (sticky!), AximSite, PPC Magazine, PPCT (frontpage!), BrightHand) on this.

Therefore, if you want to be 'at the bleeding edge' of making the Pocket PC as user-friendly and configurable as possible, you definitely need a registry editor.

I've tested the following registry editors:

RegEditCE 2.6 by Grundle Software

(also see here). The oldest registry editor on the WindowsCE platform - for example, it (or, more precisely, a previous vesion) even has a WindowsCE 1.0 build.

It has severe problems (crashes) with WM2003+ (works OK in previous op. systems - tested on the PPC2k2) and certainly lacks a lot of features like Regedit4/5-compliance. Because of the very high price tag and the lack of WM2003+ compliance, I woulnd't recommend this application at all.

BitsInside RegEdit 1.2 (a.k.a XirCuit Xreg v1.2)

These are exactly the same applications from the same developer often changing its name. Note that, therfore, neither of these developers have any Web page any more - all the links you'll run into are third-party download servers only. Therefore, it's highly unlikely these (free) apps will be ever updated. Not recommended.

EdReg 1.0

Another "also run", albeit at least free registry editor. Definitely not recommended: it's buggy on WM2003+ and supports no export/import.

Merlin RegEdit v1.0

Slightly better, but commercial app. I don't recommend it either - Resco delivers MUCH more for the price.

Kilmist Registry Editor 2.5

It's a bit better than the previous apps. However, its certainly worse than Resco. Not recommended.

Total Commander (TC) for Pocket PC 2.0

This is a very nice, free file explorer app, with not very good registry editing capabilities.

PHM Registry Editor 0.70

This, along with the Tascal app, is recommended. Despite being free, it has a lot of goodies (and some bugs too).

Please note that the PHM site has not been accessible lately. You can also download the editor here.


Tascal Registry Editor (TRE) 0.90p

Another free registry editor I like (and even support in my public registry exports). With its own share of problems and shortcomings, though.

Resco File Explorer/ Registry Editor 5.22

This is clearly the best registry editor. Highly recommended!

Vidya Pocket Registry Editor 1.0.5

Unfortunately, I couldn't test all its features because of the trial version restrictions (I don't understand why some software developers cripple their trial software this much. If I, as with many other users that would really like to test an app before buying, had had the chance to test a fully-functional trial of this app, I would probably have found it even better than Resco. Sorry guys - no usable trial version, no test winning because not even the test author can test the app.) Otherwise, except for the unique 'binary search' capabilities, I don't think it's better than the Resco app, particularly if you take its price into account. (Again, I wasn't able to test its cruical functions. It may be better - or not.)

Mobile Registry Editor 1.1

This free app, as opposed to all the previous titles, runs on the PC. Not a particularly fast registry editor/viewer (without searching capabilities) app and has very annoying bugs (for example, if you remove the PDA from the cradle, it keeps searching and it's only in the task manager that you can kill it), but, otherwise, usable. Recommended.

I've disqualified the free Sabon Rai Registry Viewer v1.4 because it's just intolerably slow, even at downloading the registry, let alone searching. Avoid it.

Now, for the much more thorough test - the comparison chart (please click the links for the related screenshot - there're 70 (yes, seventy!) of them. Make sure you don't miss them if you want to see a screenshot of almost all dialogs of all these apps) and its description, along with more elaboration on the bugs/features of the individual reged apps.

Description of the comparison chart:

Price: the price of an app is very important if you take into account that the best registry viewer, Resco, is constantly upgraded and you also get a whole slew of other, also high-quality utilities included in the price. (Note that its Today plug-in is pretty new and isn't, therefore, the best (alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, PPC Magazine, FirstLoox, BrightHand). Also, its FTP client isn't the fastest when operating on storage cards (alternative here). Nevertheless, it's still a very good buy for the price.) That is, none of the other commercial apps are as good as price/performance ratio-wise than Resco.

Last version dated at: the date of the latest version is pretty important to see which of these apps are constantly upgraded. Unfortunately, very few of them - in this, Resco is also a clear winner. TC and Vidya are the close second.

Recommended?: my opinions and recommendations.

Compatibility: does it have PPC clients for all the platforms, including old MIPS/SH3-based PPC2k devices? Does it run in newer op. systems? Unfortunately, as can clearly be seen, two of the commonly available registry editors are buggy in WM2003+.

Last position remembered?: This can be very important if you need to close your registry apps between consequental editing (for example, to test the new system colors, which involves a reset). Then, to avoid (sometimes time-consuming and extensive) searching, a reged app should be used that automatically goes back to the last position after the restart.

Favourites?: can you assign favourites to a given registry key to make navigation much faster? With them, you can even alleviate the pain resulting from the lack of the ability to remember the last position.

Registry Import group:

A decent registry editor application should support at least registry file import to be able to import third-party registry patch files. There're tons of situations they may be needed - for example, cross-ROM-upgrade backup restoration patches, more complicated registry imports (for example, safe system color editing) etc. The same stands for its own registry scripts.

The import format compatibility is very important. For example, if a given app is only compatible with a scarce format (see for example RegEditCE, which is only compatible with CE2 and not the much more common REGEDIT4/5 formats), then, you may end up having to get/purchase another registry editor to be able to read registry files provided by other people.

To test the import compatibility, I've made numerous tests with the regimport-capable registry editors with wildly varying results. These tests were immensely useful because a lot of registry editors have turned out to be just swallowing error messages of incompatible registry import formats, causing even more confusion and problems.

First, before going on for the actual tests, I elaborate a bit on the two current/well-known formats, Regedit 4 and 5 (R4/R5 for short).

The first is the native format of older, non-Unicode desktop Windows versions (Win95/98/NT4); the latter is that of newer ones (for example, 2k/XP).

Unfortunately, no PPC-based registry editors support both of these formats (they're either 4 or 5 only - or, as with RegEditCE, none of them), and they heavily vary in the error messages they display upon encountering the other format. (Most of them don't report any messages, as has already been mentioned - they just don't import anything. This is certainly a very bad behaviour. In this respect, Resco is also the best.)

These two registry formats (R4 and R5) are common in that:
1, a well-formed, valid registry file should begin with a line identifying the version. This line should be either "Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00" or "REGEDIT4" for the two versions.
2, this line should be followed with an empty line (that is, an additional CRLF).
3, only after this should come the registry contents, using " marks even for one-word value names (as opposed to, say, REGEDITCE2) - that is, individual values should be in the form of "name"=value and not in name=value.
4, as opposed to several PPC-based registry editors, 'default' (nameless) values should be in the form of @=value and not in "Default"=value (or, as with REGEDITCE2, Default=value). Unfortunately, not all registry editors export values in the standard format.
5, version 4 is ASCII and version 5 is Unicode; however, both the PC-based and the PPC regeds are able to read files in the opposite file format.

Please note that I haven't tested the reged compatibility of files that aren't standard - for example, ones that lack the standard header (Resco isn't able to read them, that's for sure). For example, not even the desktop Windows regedit.exe accepts registry files that don't start with any of the two above-mentioned headers (see bullet one).

Again, note that registry editors that create non-standard export files (Kilmist, Merlin) are able to read back their export files; PHM also creates a headerless export by default, but it has no import capabilities.

I've tested the reged apps using standard R5, standard (the one that uses @ to denote default values) R4, non-standard (in that they use "Default" instead of @) R4 and RegeditCE2 format files. I used the latter to find out compatibility with the really old CE2 format.

The compatibility test results can be seen in the Standard R5 import test? Unicode/non-unicode, Standard R4 import test? Unicode/non-unicode, R4 with "Default" import test? Unicode/non-unicode and REGEDITCE2 import test? rows.

As can be seen, the results are very bad, particularly in that that the majority of the regeds don't report unparseable files when they encounter them. (The exceptions are Resco, the otherwise useless - it can't read any current format - RegEditCE and TC.) You must pay special attention to this question, particularly if you plan to use TRE or Kilmist! You won't get error messages; still, nothing will be imported. And, what is even worse, with Merlin and Kilmist, the default values in standard (!) R4 files will not be imported - you must use the "Default" R4 format with these regeds, which require you to do a generic search and replace on third-party, standard R4/R5 scripts before giving them to these two reged apps.

Registry Export group:

As far as registry export is concerned, it's also very important - for example, to track down registry changes using third-party, external tools. Here, standards compliance isn't as important as with importing ((Win)Diff is able to compare regexport file pairs even if they are in a common nonstandard format), unless you want to give your registry exports to other people to read in.

If you, however, want to give your registry exports to other people, to avoid the error-prone manual post-conversions, you should go right at the beginning for a standards-compliant registry editor instead of a non-standard one:

1, Kilmist and Merlin uses the "Default" value name instead of @ to denote default values
2, PHM in default mode (its R4 and the R5 (which is R4 too) output, on the other hand, are 100% standard), Merlin and Kilmist don't insert the standard registry header at the start of the file
3, RegEditCE has turned out to be the absolute loser in here too - its CE2 export format isn't compatible with anything else

Note that failing this test shouldn't be the one and only showstopper for any reged app because even scripts in non-standard formats can very easily be converted into a standard one - if you want to edit your export files, that is.

For example, if a given app doesn't include a header in the registry export script, you can simply copy and paste it to from a standard file (making sure it's followed by an empty line).

In addition, if it uses "Default" instead of @, its exports pretty easy to be converted into a standard-compliant file format. For example, with Microsoft Word, you only have to chage all occurrences of ^p"Default" to ^p@ (and vice versa, if you want to make a standard non-"Default" script Kilmist/Merlin-compliant). With a decent regexp-capable editor like EditPad Pro (also see this review - note that regular-expressions.info is a really decent regexp site!), you need to change \n@ to <Shift-Enter>"Default" (and, in the other direction, \n"Default" to <Shift-Enter>@).

Back to the subject of the comparison chart, I've scrutinized three things as far as exporting capabilities are concerned: the header (do they insert the correct Regedit 4/5-compliant headers?), is their output Unicode or not (R4, by default, isn't; R5 is; but, as has already been pointed out, there is little importance of this on both the PC and the PPC, except for Merlin, which has a buggy Unicode export: it puts the CR LF bytes in the same character, and, therefore, should never be made export anything using Unicode) and do they use the @ letter or the "Default" word to export default values.

Finally, I've also provided the scripts exported by the reged apps so that you can also scrutinize them.

Backup/restore? : this is an entirely separate group; this is why I used bold to separate it from the previous ones. Full backup/restore capabilities make it possible to backup and restore the Registry in one step. Only one reged app, PHM supports this. It worked flawlessly on both my WM2003+ test PDA's.

Note that the backup file format is binary and, therefore, you can't use the restore functionality to import registry files (importing is the most missing feature of PHM).

Search? group:

Searching capabilities are also very important especially for people that not only "passively" use a registry editor but would like to actively look for things to, for example, invent registry hacks.

Note that if a reged app doesn't directly support this functionality, you can still export the full registry and make a search with even Pocket Word (after renaming the .reg file to .txt with a decent, extension renaming-capable - the built-in Pocket File Explorer can't rename extensions - file handler tool like TC). It's, however, pretty awkward and doesn't necessarily find everything, particularly binary and/or text values in binary data (see the LdapInfo test below for a more thorough explanation of this). Therefore, it's the best to go for a tool that supports searching right at the beginning - in both key names and value names/values.

Unfortunately, two of otherwise very good and free registry editors, TC and TRE, have certainly failed this tests. TRE doesn't have any kind of search functionality and TC can't find in values, only in names. Unfortunately, the desktop-based, free MRE doesn't have any kind of searching capabilities either.

At the opposite end of spectrum, there's Resco (which is able to find Unicode textual input even in binary data (see the LdapInfo test)) and Vidya, which even offers binary searching capabilities. In this respect, it's even better than Resco. (Unfortunately, due to the trial restrictions, I couldn't test this if it really works.) Actually, this is the only area where Vidya definitely outperforms Resco, in addition to the backward searching capabilities.

The first three tests in this group, Match whole string only?, Case sensitive /insensitive? and Key/values/data?, speak for themselves.

The fourth, Unicode binary data (LdapInfo) test?, needs a bit more explanation. This test finds out whether the given app is able to find Unicode textual data in binary data. I've tested this with seraching for Messaging account information, which is stored in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\Inbox\LdapInfo]. Only Resco was able to find it. (Again, I couldn't test Vidya in this test either because of the trial restrictions.)

Finally, Find next/previous? shows whether it's easy to jump straight to the next/previous hit from inside the app. Most regeds support the direct search for the next hit; Vidya, in addition, is supposed (couldn't test whether it really works) to be able to go back to the previous one(s), too. The clear loser in here is, again, TC because of the way it presents search results - it shows the full path of all of the hits and once you choose one to find out its value, you must re-start the entire search process from the start if you want to find out more hits too (there is not any kind of "step back to the hit list" functionality).

Finally, the Editing capabilities group follows.

If you plan/need to edit your registry, in addition to the standard string editing capabilities (which all the edit-capable reged apps support; this is why I haven't devoted a separate chart row to it) you may need to edit other, more advanced data types. In the subtests, I've tested of the advanced capabilities of the reged apps.

DWORD hexa/decimal/binary

In addition to string, DWORD values are the most common data types you'll edit. By default, all regeds let you enter values in decimal. More advanced ones, however, may let you even enter values in hexa and/or binary too.

The lack of at least the hexa numbers isn't that big a problem (even if the built-in Calculator in Pocket PC operating systems - not even in WM2003SE - , doesn't support hexa conversions, unlike its desktop conterpart), apart from very special cases like editing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ System\GDI\SYSFNT\Ht on WM2003 devices, where you must suppy a negative value (for example, FFFFFFF4), which is much easier to enter or even compute in hexa than in decimal (4294967284) without looking it up from somewhere or computing it in Calculator (did I say you can't even directly compute 2³² in Calculator?), copying the result to the clipboard and then, into the reged. (Please see my article http://pocketpcmag.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15759 on font size hacking in different WM operating systems if interested.)

Most regeds offer at least hexa (PHM and Merlin, in addition, also binary) editing capabilities. The clear loser is the otherwise promising Vidya and Kilmist with their decimal-only support.

Editing binary data: this can be very important in cases like editing system colors; see for example the case of [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Color] (for example this tutorial and this article on Today theme-related questions (alternative here) on this). Two things can greatly help in editing binary data: index on left/char representation on right? and copy/paste?.

Support of the former not only results in showing the bytes in the edited binary data, but also their position and the character representation of them. In this area, Resco, Merlin and Vidya, which all have advanced editors, are the winner.

Support for copy/paste functionality, on the other hand, makes it easy to easily change a series of bytes in a binary data structure. An example where this can be very handy is you want, for example, to 'hack in' a long APN name in a GPRS modem init string into [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Comm\ RasBook\<connection name>\DevCfg] to circumvent the (silly and unneeded) 40-char limit (also see this article on the subject) of the modem init strings in WM2003+ versions as described in my (non-English!) article on connectivity questions. Then, to avoid manually entering some 10-15 binary bytes in the registry, it can be really advantageous to have paste capabilities to just copy the given bytes from another source (like in my latter article), overwriting the previous, highligthed ones.

Note that the latter isn't a common scenario at all (I've only managed to make it a real timesaver with hacking modem init strings) and, therefore, the lack of copy/paste in Resco/Merlin/Vidya shouldn't be considered a big problem. Their support for position counter and text field, in contrast, is a much bigger advantage in, say, setting system colors by hand than the disadvantage of the lacking copy/paste functionality.

Finally, (bug-free) support for multiline values (REG_MULTI_SZ) is another stumbling block for quite a few reged apps.

The most important REG_MULTI_SZ registry value is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Loader\SystemPath (see my articles on relocating DLL’s to the File Store on its importance; some links can be found for example in my Fine-tune your memory consumption - relocating uninstall/update-time stuff article (alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, PPC Magazine, FirstLoox, PPCT). Unfortunately, the otherwise pretty good PHM is absolutely useless in editing these fields because of its bugs. In addition, TC doesn’t let edit these fields as text fields, only as binary ones. Merlin has absolutely no support for these fields. Finally, EdReg (if you still plan to use it) is buggy too in this area.

Note that SystemPath is probably the only multiline registry value you'll ever need to edit. If your reged doesn't support it and you don't want to use another, a number of other applications will set SystemPath for you; for example, SKTools, MemMaid, Tweaks2k2 etc. Please see this article (alternative here) on the first two.