The famous arcade times text editor from Pahlen & Krauß originally released on Atari ST and now available as a 64-Bit application for Windows 7 and newer
- Here is the link to the Changelog
- Installable versions of PKS Edit can be downloaded here:
The editor contains only some basic features compared to modern text editors such as Ultra Edit.
Here are some highlights:
- it is very fast, if files do not get too big (no memory mapped files support yet). Opening a code file with 1 million lines of code takes less then a second on a medium equipped machine. Replacing every single character by an 'x' (replace regular expression '.' by 'x' honoring case sensitivity) on that same file takes about 5 seconds, undoing this operation takes about 1 second.
- search & replace with options like regular expression matching
- search & replace in multiple files
- file comparison
- syntax highlighting
- multi-caret editing
- user interface in English or German (other languages may follow)
- multiple views on single file
- cross references in code and references to other files and URLs (cross references in code requires a tag file - e.g. created using ctags)
- auto-indentation and some basic formatting
- sorting files
- code completion
- support for zooming font sizes (using keyboard and scrollwheel)
- record & play and a macro language allowing to edit the recorded macros
- different selection styles (block, line, normal)
- support for different file types and for user-defined grammars
- user defined templates
- hex editor mode for binary files
- support for themes - e.g. support for a dark theme.
- docking windows UI
- wysiwyg mode for markdown documents (currently readonly, typically wysiwyg window opened as 2nd view of an editable document)
- support for tail -f mode to view large log files and watch them being appended
- additional simple coding features such as automatic bracket matching or auto-indenting or shifting or moving text blocks or toggle comments for text blocks
- session management keeping track of previously opened files etc...
- the PKS Edit Manual describes, how to work with PKS Edit.
The examples directory contains several coding samples demonstrating the features of PKS Edit when it comes to using it to edit files of a given supported type.
To install PKS Edit, you may use the provided Inno Setup based installer. The installer will associate typical file extensions and make PKS Edit the default editor for those extensions if you request it to do so.
PKS Edit supports the Universal Ctags format for navigating cross references. By default PKS Edit will try to locate a file named "tags" in the current working directory to navigate cross references. One may navigate a reference by clicking with Ctrl+Left Mouse Button onto a word in the source code.
To change, edit, compile and run the source code of PKS Edit, we recommend to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2022. The community edition will do it - you do not need a professional or enterprise edition. Simply open the Pksedit.sln solution and run / debug / build it.
To enhance the macro compiler, you need win__flex and win__bison. You may download flex and bison from here. We currently use the latest version 2.5.25.
- https://github.com/lexxmark/winflexbison Install win_flex and win_bison into a directory GNU_HOME/bin and set the environment variable GNU_HOME to point to that directory: The bin directory containing the files should be placed below GNU_HOME.
In order to edit the or execute the installation script (pksedit.iss), you need to download Inno Setup (we use currently the latest version 6.2).
Enjoy Tom & Rolf