Your favourite IDE, reinvented in the open.

What you get

A workbench, not a tribute act.

Every window is where muscle memory expects it, and the keys still do what your hands already know. F5 runs. F4 is properties. F2 is the object browser. Ctrl+G brings up the Immediate window, where Debug.Print output lands.

Underneath it is a genuine VB6 file format implementation — it reads the real files rather than importing them, which is why a project opens with its own structure intact.

Writing them back was the harder half, and most of it is now done. The designer writer used to rebuild a form from an in-memory model in its own shape; it now reproduces the original — the order VB6 writes properties in, the column its values line up on, the comment it puts beside an enum, and both of the two rectangles a form actually has. Sixteen of the twenty-two Microsoft-authored forms in the reference corpus survive a save byte-for-byte, and the six that do not are the six HexIDE opens read-only rather than damage. That is measured on every build, and you can still see exactly what a save changes.