PeDAL – APDL Editor
PADT, Inc. has released an APDL text editor called PeDAL. A screenshot is below (click on the image below to enlarge):
Text editors used for ANSYS input files have syntax highlighting, so that is not what sets PeDAL apart. Instead, PeDAL’s integration with the ANSYS Help System is great because you can easily hit the [F1] key to get detailed help information on the side window. Moreover, as you type, the command syntax appears, akin to the Input Prompt in the ANSYS GUI. These features alone make PeDAL a great editor for APDL macros and input files.
Check out the PeDAL website for more screenshots and additional information on its capabilities (there are a lot of small but useful features in PeDAL — too many to list here). It is not free, but you can try it out before deciding on whether to purchase it.
Just spent an hour trying this tool out. Pretty neat, has some very useful features. I’m probably holding out on it for a while though, its missing quite a bit of functionality that a dedicated text editor like Textpad has, and it also couldn’t handle some of the large (100MB+) files such as Workbench *.dat files that I need to edit.
Thanks, Chris, for taking a look at Pedal.
You bring up a valid point about filesize that I’ll pass long to the developer of Pedal.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for trying PeDAL. I’ve been aware of the unfortunate file size limit due to the editor component that I am using. However, I just released a 64-bit version that can support much larger file sizes. I can open 0.5Gb files on my machine now with no problem. Just for curiosity sake, what are some of the other features you would like to see? Perhaps I can implement them in the future.