Shubus Viewer

Shubus Viewer is a tiny and portable piece of software that gives you the possibility to open and view the content of several file types, such as text, games (DCR, SWF, UNITY3D), web pages and popular image formats. Plus, it lets you directly examine data via hexadecimal or binary display.

Portable app with a simplistic interface

Since there is no setup pack involved, you can drop the program files in any part of the disk and just click the executable to launch Shubus Viewer. Another possibility is to save it to a pen drive or other removable storage unit, in order to run it on any PC with minimum effort and no previous installers. Moreover, it doesn't modify Windows registry settings.
Represented by a large window with a seemingly outdated appearance and minimalistic structure, the interface is approachable. Files can be opened using the file browser only, since drag-and-drop is not supported.

Configure view options

Apart from viewing text content, you can make selections, copy and paste text, select the current line only, increase or decrease the font size, as well as prevent other users from making modifications by making files read-only. When viewing images and files with any other extension besides text, Shubus Viewer lets you switch the display mode to hex or binary.

Change the text and web encoding

It's also possible to choose a different encoding method for viewing the current text document, thanks to the fact that Shubus Viewer offers support for multiple options in this regard, including UTF-7, 8, 16, 32 and 32BE, Unicode-BE, Macintosh West Europe, and US ASCII. You can browse a list with encoding modes, explore additional options by opening a drop-down menu, or manually enter the name or number of the preferred code page.
Web encoding modes are available too, namely Base64 encode and decode, along with URL encode and decode. Furthermore, you can open a text selection as a link in the default web browser, or look up more information on Google.

Evaluation and conclusion

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that the utility didn't hang, crash or display error messages. It had minimal impact on computer performance and needed low CPU and RAM to work properly. Too bad that it hasn't been updated for a long time. Otherwise, Shubus Viewer gets the job done.