Although it had been intended to be a developer tool, power users often used it to edit icons, menus, and other elements of an application's GUI, customizing it to their own preferences.

ResEdit included support for editing many of the standard types and for creating arbitrary resources with any structure a programmer saw fit.

Later, the application code could create a functional dialog box using the stored resource data which matches the appearance you lay out in ResEdit.

A long-standing third-party commercial alternative named Resorcerer remains available,[2] and more recently there have been a number of attempts to build open-source macOS-native resource editors, including one called ResKnife.

Unofficial hacks released as ResEdit 2.1.4 and later exist, adding features such as a decompiler and the ability to edit data forks, but these are unsupported by Apple.