u/smilaise

Happy Self Promotion Wednesday! I made a small family of free GPLv3 Windows utilities under the Killer Tools name, and two of them just got updates.

KillerShell 1.2.2 is a file manager with a built-in terminal, text editor, and admin tools (Task Manager, Event Viewer, Registry Editor, Performance Monitor) as tabs in one window. Archives open like folders, and you can write into a .zip from inside it - drag files in, rename, delete - with the original never touched until the rebuilt archive is verified. The Storage Analyzer draws a whole drive as a treemap, WizTree-style, and as of 1.2.2 it can export scans as self-contained HTML reports. This release also finishes theme coverage across all thirteen themes (including a full Windows 98SE recreation with a period icon set), completes localization in all eleven languages (now with Polish), and makes portable installs and updates a lot safer.

The Killendar 1.1.0 is a desktop calendar. Month, week, day and agenda views, repeating appointments, color categories, and iCalendar/CSV import and export. Your appointments live in a single .kcal file on your own machine - plain SQLite you can back up or open with any SQLite tool, with optional AES-256 encryption. 1.1.0 brings it up to the same thirteen themes as the rest of the family, adds interface scaling from 80% to 150%, Ctrl+wheel zoom in Month view from one to six visible weeks, one-click portable storage, and Polish translation.

Both are single portable exes - run them from anywhere, or let them install themselves if you prefer. No account needed, nothing phones home.

I also updated the themes on killertools.net, the hub site for the whole family, so it's worth a look if you want to see everything else I have.

I just released KillerPDF 1.7.2 and then a 1.7.3 hotfix immediately afterwards because of an embarrassing bug.

New in these releases:

• Seven new themes and Polish localization

• Book layout for two-page viewing

• Levels controls for improving pale or hard-to-read scans

• Paper size and source controls in the print dialog

• Column-aware text selection

• Support for comb-style form fields

• Separate night mode for each split pane

• Lower memory use on large PDFs

• Live previews when selecting images

• A pile of rendering, form, theme, and interface fixes

KillerPDF is local-only with no account, subscription, telemetry, or cloud uploads. All my stuff is GPLv3.

Please report bugs and feature requests in the GitHub Issues, that's how we keep making this app better.

https://killerpdf.net

A while back I built KillerFind, a file search tool for Windows. Wildcards, content search, no indexing. It worked fine. As far as I can tell, almost nobody used it.

I think I know why. Nobody wants a file search app. You want a file search once, you get your answer, you close it. It has no reason to stay open, it never earns a spot on your taskbar, so you forget it exists and end up back in Explorer's search box being disappointed. It was the least useful thing I've built, and it was competing with a feature Windows already ships badly.

So instead of polishing a thing nobody opens, I asked what I actually do all shift. It turned out to be the same loop over and over: find a file, open a terminal in that folder, edit something. Three apps, three tab strips, three sets of keys, and a lot of alt-tabbing between them.

KillerShell is those three things in one window. A file browser, a terminal and a text editor sharing one tab strip and one set of keys. Find the log, drop into PowerShell already in that folder, open the file, all without leaving the window.

The search engine is still in there, unchanged, but it's now one of the things it does rather than the whole point of it. Which is exactly why the name had to go.

What's in it:

Search. Wildcard filename or line-by-line content search across any directory. Results stream as they're found, nothing is indexed ahead of time, so no background service and no first-run wait.

Terminal. PowerShell or cmd in a tab, opening in the folder you were just looking at.

Editor. Plain text with highlighting for what techs actually open: ps1, bat, reg, ini, logs, markdown, JSON, XML, YAML, CSV. AvalonEdit, vendored into the exe, so there's still nothing to install.

$PROFILE editing from a menu, a right click, or Ctrl+comma, with both PowerShell hosts listed so you don't edit the wrong one.

It's still a single portable exe. No installer, no runtime, no account, no telemetry. Free, GPLv3.

It went from the app I'd written off to the one I have open every day. Turns out the tool wasn't bad, it was just too small to be worth opening.

Download: https://killershell.net

Source: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerShell

Currently 1.0.2. killerfind.net redirects, so old links still land.

I'm a field tech at an MSP, and this is the thing I use on shift rather than a side project I imagine someone using. If something's awkward or missing, I'd like to hear it.

I'm a field tech at an MSP, and I'm in and out of a dozen or more M365 tenants on a normal day. The annoying part is that when you connect to Exchange Online or Graph, the auth broker just reuses whatever login it cached last. It's way too easy to run a command against the wrong tenant before you realize you never landed where you thought you did.

KillerPivot is how I deal with that now. When you connect, it turns the broker off so you get a real sign-in prompt instead of a silent reconnect, then it checks the session and tells you which tenant you're actually in before you do anything. You save your tenants once and jump between them by name.

Commands:

• Connect-PivotTenant (pivot) connects and verifies you. Add -Graph if you need Graph.
• Get-PivotContext (pvc) shows where you're connected.
• Disconnect-PivotTenant (pvx) drops all the sessions.
• Add-PivotTenant, Get-PivotTenant, and Remove-PivotTenant manage the saved list.

It works on 5.1 and 7. You'll need ExchangeOnlineManagement v3 or newer, plus Microsoft.Graph.Authentication only if you use -Graph.

Install-Module KillerPivot -Scope CurrentUser

Code's on GitHub under GPL-3.0: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/killer-modules/tree/main/KillerPivot

If you try it and hit something weird, let me know. The broker has some edge cases and I'd rather hear about them.

It's also up on killertools.net with the rest of my stuff.

Some of you know the deal by now: I'm a field tech at an MSP, and when something on my bench is broken enough, it becomes a Killer tool. KillerPDF happened because PDF editors wanted subscriptions. KillerScan happened because network scanners wanted agents. This one happened because I caught myself keeping client credentials in a Notepad window titled "Untitled - Notepad" for the better part of a year.

KillerNotes is a notepad the way a tech actually needs one. Everything lands in one place, full-text search finds it as fast as you can type, and the whole database encrypts with SQLCipher AES-256 behind one click on a lock button. Paste screenshots inline, drop in real tables, resize images without wrecking them. And my favorite part: grab a note in the sidebar and drag it into Teams, and it lands as a .knote file your coworker double-clicks to import - a tear-off sheet from your notepad, share password optional.

The usual house rules apply, and they're never changing: single signed exe (4.3 MB), portable or installed, /silent for your RMM, no account, no cloud, no telemetry, no ads, GPLv3 with the source zip attached to every release.

One honest warning, because it's a feature and not a bug: there is no password recovery. Forget it and the data is cryptographically gone. Your clients' credentials deserve nothing less.

Windows 10/11 only, notes live on your machine, and it's a fresh 1.0.0 - the issues page is open and you people have proven you'll fill it with better ideas than mine.

https://killernotes.net
https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerNotes

EDIT - 1.0.1 is out. You asked, so here it is, less than a day later:

• Color-coded tags (Outlook-style) - tag a note with one or more colored labels, click a pill to filter to it, and right-click or F7 to add/rename/recolor them. Tag definitions ride inside the shared files too.
• Adjustable font size and a full color picker - hue/sat square, hex, a desktop-wide eyedropper, saved swatches - for both text and highlights.
• Per-note title colors - color a note's title in the sidebar so the ones you live in stand out.
• Per-note spell check - uses your installed Windows languages, remembered per note.
• Fixed a phantom "Untitled" note that showed up at startup, and a password-protection failure that could cost you unsaved edits.

Update straight from the About screen or grab it off the releases page. Keep the ideas coming.

KillerPDF is an offline PDF editor for Windows (10/11 x64). A single portable executable that targets .NET Framework 4.8 with no runtime install, no accounts, and no telemetry. Rendering is PDFium; the write path is PdfSharpCore.

1.6.4 is mostly about making the tool scriptable and making saves provably non-destructive.

Command-line interface - every core operation is now exposed headless: --merge, --split, --extract-pages, --decrypt, --to-image, --flatten, --print, --ocr, and --batch-resave. These reuse the exact pipelines the GUI runs rather than a parallel code path, return real exit codes, and work while the app is already open. That makes it usable in scripts and batch jobs without a second implementation to drift out of sync.

Save integrity. The big one under the hood: PdfSharpCore is now vendored and patched with six standards fixes, and every release is validated against veraPDF across a 2,900-file corpus. The goal is that a round-trip save never degrades PDF/A conformance, so a valid document leaves exactly as valid as it came in. Results are checked into the repo under validation/RESULTS.md.

Concurrency fix. Several bug fixes. SixLabors.ImageSharp bumped 1.0.4 to 2.1.13, clearing seven published advisories in image parsing (import, clipboard paste, signature images).

Also added in the GUI: in-place bookmark editing, redo, browser-style jump history, and a visual keyboard view for shortcuts.

Source and releases: github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF (GPLv3). Feedback and issues welcome.

https://KillerPDF.net

When you "edit text" in most free PDF tools, you're not editing the PDF's text objects. You're getting an overlay that's matched to the original font so it looks native. KillerPDF currently works this way too, with font matching against the original document, and I'd rather say that outright than let someone discover it after editing a contract.

True content-stream editing is what I'm building toward now, and it's genuinely hard, which is probably why so many tools fake it quietly.

With that out of the way, what KillerPDF actually is: a free, GPLv3 PDF editor for Windows in one self-contained 14.6MB exe. Install per-user or run it portable off a flash drive. No account, no telemetry, no cloud, and no AI, which I gather is a selling point in this sub lately.

What's in it as of 1.6.3: PDFium rendering with single, continuous, and grid view modes, tabbed documents, offline OCR via Tesseract (whole page, dragged region straight to clipboard, or make a scan searchable), merge, split, rotate, reorder, insert images, form filling, signatures including digital certificates, print, flatten, and password-protected files decrypt to memory only, so the file on disk is never touched.

The UI is localized in 9 languages including Japanese which was added yesterday, and there are 21 theme and color variants if the default isn't your thing.

The annotation system is the part I'd actually defend against paid tools. Word-wrapping resizable text boxes with optional whiteout fill, draw, lines, and highlights each with independent color, opacity, and width, a full RGB picker with eyedropper, and everything stays selectable, movable, and restylable after placement instead of being fossilized the moment you click away.

Since someone will ask how it stacks against the usual recommendations here:

PDF-XChange Editor is excellent and does real text editing today. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it's freemium: the licensed features watermark your output until you pay for a perpetual license, and the full installer is several hundred MB. KillerPDF is 14.6MB total. If you need heavyweight professional editing right now, buy PDF-XChange, it's worth the money. If you need a fast, clean editor that's actually free with no watermarked tiers, that's my lane.

PDFgear is free with no watermarks and it's genuinely capable. It's also closed source, investor-funded, ships a ChatGPT copilot, sends some operations through their servers, and has publicly said advanced features will become paid down the road. Nothing wrong with that model, but it's a bet on a company. KillerPDF is GPLv3 with full source on GitHub. There's no monetization plan to pivot on, because there's no monetization plan.

Other current gaps besides text editing: Windows only (cross-platform is on the roadmap, not around the corner), and no compression pass yet.

I'm a field tech at an MSP and this is one of several tools I maintain for people who fix other people's computers. Issues get responses, and multiple 1.6.x fixes came directly from user bug reports, credited in the changelog.

Let me know how to make it better.

https://killerpdf.net

Free and open-source, GPLv3 PDF Editor for Windows

v1.6.0 is out, and it's the big one!
Here's what is new since the last release:

- OCR is now built into the exe (Tesseract): OCR a page or a dragged region to the clipboard, make a scan searchable, or extract all text. Extra languages download on demand, fully offline.

- Digital signatures with a cloud certificate (Certum SimplySign), reusable signatures, and click-to-sign form fields.

- Tabs - open as many PDFs as you want, each remembering its page, zoom, and view mode.

- Transform tool: rotate by a fine angle, scale, flip, and straighten a crooked scan by drawing a line along anything that should be level, with live preview.

- Editing upgrades: a Line tool, resizable word-wrapping text boxes with an optional whiteout fill, edit-existing-text, and a full RGB color picker with an eyedropper.

- Printing got a real overhaul: true 300 DPI, scale/position/margins/two-sided, and a proper preview.

- New translations: German, French, Bengali, Turkish, and Simplified Chinese (thanks to everyone who sent them in).

- Under the hood: the whole UI was split out of one 15k-line file into ~40 focused files, and the render pipeline was unified so annotations, search, and tools behave identically across every view mode.

- A full visual overhaul too: new logo, icons, and fonts throughout, plus 21 theme combinations - six base themes (Dark, Light, Black, Blood, Greed, Cyanotic) with six swappable accent colors on the neutral three.

Plus the usual pile of fixes: print crashes, form fields, grid-view navigation, search lag on huge docs, and more.

Check out the upgraded website with a new technical datasheet explaining some of the goings-on under the hood and a Help page with explanations of all the tools and shortcuts.

EDIT: I've moved to killerPDF.net !

Full changelog: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF/releases/latest

Bug reports and feature requests welcome, as always.

Some of you have seen my earlier posts about KillerPDF - thanks for the support on those, it's genuinely what keeps me building this. Back with a chunky update.

Quick refresher: KillerPDF is a free, open-source (GPLv3), no account, no subscription, no telemetry PDF editor. It is a single portable EXE that runs off a USB stick, or a per-user install with no UAC. I'm a field tech who got tired of Adobe and built the thing I wanted.

I shipped a big 1.5.0 and then a 1.5.1 update about 2 hours later, because apparently releasing to you fine people is my QA process now. Testing in prod is the only thing that gets me excited these days. Combined rundown:

View / UI

- Four view modes: Single, Continuous scroll, Two-Page, and a Grid of every page

- A print dialog with an actual print preview (Windows' own dialog refuses to preview, so I built one)

- 6 themes - Dark, Light, High Contrast, Blood, Greed, Cyanotic - live switching

- Localized UI: English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese (PRs welcome for more)

Editing

- Inline text editing with font matching; double-click placed text to re-edit

- Highlights, freehand, text boxes, reusable signatures, drop images onto pages

- Crop tool with a coordinate editor and page-range apply

- Merge / split / reorder / rotate / extract pages

- PDF form filling, bookmark/outline nav, full-text search

The 1.5.1 "tested in prod" patches

- Multi-core Save Flattened - large docs flatten a lot faster

- Fixed a class of PDFs that wouldn't open ("Unexpected EOF" - a strict Flate inflater choking on multi-revision files; now recovered losslessly through PDFium). One of you reproduced it down to a 15-byte zlib blob, which was the best bug report I've ever received.

- Grid view loads all pages now and streams them in, instead of quietly stopping at 26

- A few zoom and scrollbar papercuts

Download: https://pdf.killertools.net

Source: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF

Bug reports very welcome. Going by 1.5.1, I clearly need them.

EDIT: New Bug Detected! It has been reported so e users are having issues with "undo" in certain view modes. Be cautious until I can release a 1.5.2 bug fix later this week.

I built five new photography tools for killertools.net, a site that's mostly tech and sysadmin stuff but apparently I have a film problem too.

What's there right now:

• Film development calculator - pick your developer, dilution, film stock, and temperature, and it spits out your adjusted time with push/pull support. There's also a built-in process timer that walks you through each stage (B&W, C-41, or E6) with agitation notes and a beep when stages finish.
• Reciprocity failure calculator - covers a bunch of common films with their real exponents, not just generic guesses.
• ND filter calculator - figure out your long exposure time for any filter strength.
• Depth of field calculator - hyperfocal, near/far limits, works for any format.
• Exposure equivalence - find equivalent exposures across apertures.

Still adding data to the dev calculator (Massive Dev Chart + manufacturer sheets), so if you find a film/developer combo that's missing let me know. Happy to take suggestions on what else would be useful.

The website is complete ad free with strict Cloudflare content security policies in place.

Hey r/opensource,

I released v1.2.0 of KillerPDF today. It's a local-only PDF editor built because I hate Adobe. No subscription required, no account needed, no telemetry is sent anywhere, no cloud bullshit. It's a single zipped exe, ~6 MB.

What's new in 1.2.0:

• Self-installing EXE: On first launch you get an Install or Run dialog. Install puts it in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\KillerPDF\, asks if you would like to register it as your default PDF handler, and adds a Start Menu shortcut. No UAC prompt, no admin rights needed.
• Password-protected PDFs: Instead of throwing a generic error, it now prompts for the password and opens normally. The decrypted copy is held in temp for the session.
• Flatten PDF: Rasterizes every page at 150 DPI via PDFium into a fully uneditable document. Annotations are burned in before flattening. Standard for legal, compliance, and reporting workflows.

What it's always done: view, annotate, merge, split, inline text editing with font matching, reusable signatures, full-text search, print.

GPLv3, .NET Framework 4.8, no runtime to install. Runs on any Windows 10/11 x64 machine.

https://pdf.killertools.net/