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PFE, or Programmer's File Editor, is a very sturdy and capable Notepad replacement. I was always a big Notepad fan, but, in time, my text files got too long for Notepad to handle, and I never liked Wordpad's default font (too tiny for my taste). So I looked around and there it was: on one of my CD-Rs with downloaded freeware, I found this editor. It's quite straightforward to install (in fact, there is no installer at all: you just dump the zipped files into a directory of your choice, and put the shortcut to PFE32.exe in a place where you can find it later). Programmer's File Editor is a text editor, rather than a word processor, so it does not recognize other formats than pure fixed pitch text, so if you need a Wordpad or even Word replacement and TrueType support, you will have to look elsewhere.
Software Review - Pros
It can handle files of any size, limited only by the amount of virtual memory available.
It uses the Fixedsys font which you're accustomed to if you've been using Notepad.
You can configure it to display line numbers for certain files (file extensions) - you'll want to set this for all your program scripts etc. It really comes in handy when debugging scripts with Windows Scripting Host which usually gives you nothing more than a cryptic error message and a line number to work with.
DOS commands such as compilers can be run from within PFE, and their output captured in an edit window.
Commonly-used text can be inserted in a simple operation from template libraries.
Fully-remappable keyboard.
Recordable keyboard macros.
Files can be printed with two pages per sheet of paper in landscape mode or even as booklets - a feature which I've seen people try to sell you a separate utility for!
It's one of the few genuinely freeware programs that's genuinely useful at the same time.
Software Review - Cons
When cutting or deleting a large block of text, you can only undo it if it doesn't exceed a certain limited size. This is about the only limitation I've encountered in PFE. Also, the size of the search and replace fields is somewhat limited.
Unfortunately, the author has stopped developing and supporting this great editor a long time ago. As far as I know, the version 1.01.000 remains the last one to date.
User Report - Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
General
Launching PFE32 with the /r command line option allows you to specify which PFE32 configuration file you want to use.
If you have been using an old 16-bit version of PFE, you won't lose your settings when upgrading to PFE32. The INI2Reg.exe utility that comes with the Programmer's File Editor converts old ini files (Win16 standard) into registry configuration sets (Win32 standard) for you.
Despite its name, the pfedos.exe executable you get with PFE32 is not a Programmer's File Editor for DOS, but just a module needed to run external commands and capture their output.
When you start using Programmer's File Editor, you'll probably want to change the associations for certain file extensions at system level. Well, do not do this by directly editing the Registry. Programmer's File Editor has a dedicated option for this, which also sets some useful context (that is, right-click) menus for you.
