Programmer's File Editor   It was a few years ago that I first encountered the 'programmer's file editor', or PFE for short. At the time I was looking for an alternative for Window's Notepad editor and found this program to be a good choice. But PFE is more than just a plain text editor, as the name already suggests. The program has some basic features that ease the input of program or control files, like automatic and block indentation. And it can start other applications, for instance a compiler or an interpreter. I have used the program without problems with the DOS version of the POV-Ray program, which does not have its own control file editor. In this case PFE runs as the main application, on command using POV-Ray to preview the image. Currently I regularly use PFE to edit Java scripts in web pages. The program's automatic detection that an open file has been modified by an other program is very handy to prevent conflicting modifications caused by the simultaneous use of two editors. In this case a WYSIWYG web page editor is simultaneously active to modify the non-Java script contents of the page. Of course the web page editor has to support the same detection feature for this mechanism to work in two directions. An other PFE facility that occasionally comes in handy is the possibility to read and write files in UNIX format. Unfortunately the author no longer supports PFE, but the program is still available for download from a number of locations, like for instance download.com. It is freeware.

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