Virtually every article ever written about ResEdit warns you to always work on a copy and to keep backups and so on. This warning has become somewhat cliche, but we're going to do it anyway: only work on a copy of the file and keep backups

If you don't have an fmnu template (see below) and you want to change or add a command key to a menu item, you have to poke around until you find the text of the menu item's name (e.g

The System 7 Finder has been completely rewritten in C++, so none of the old ways to customize the Finder with ResEdit work anymore. There are, however, a couple of things you can do with ResEdit in the new Finder, too

Sometimes it's nice to quit the Finder. This frees up a little bit of memory (not as much as you would think) but, even better, it lets you edit the Finder or rebuild your desktop without rebooting (you can hold down the Command and Option keys when the Finder restarts and it rebuilds the desktop)

When the Finder opens or closes an item, it shows an animation effect usually called the "ZoomRect" (zooming rectangles describes it pretty well, so that's what those innovative programmers called the procedure)

When the amount of free space in the Finder is more than one megabyte, the Finder displays the free space in megabytes. I like it to keep displaying in K

The rename delay is tied to the setting for double-click speed in the Mouse Control Panel. The slower the double-click speed, the longer you wait for the Finder to enter edit mode after you click on a file name

One of the new features in Finder 7 is that it can substitute one application for another, assuming the second application can open the first one's documents