PGN Tools

A fast, dark-mode Windows desktop app for working with PGN chess files — download games, clean and organize them, enrich the tags, and run engine analysis. It streams games one at a time, so it handles multi-gigabyte PGN files without choking, all from a single app.

Built with heavy AI assistance — the owner provided the direction, requirements, and testing.

Features

Download games from where you actually get them:

• Chess.com — a player's full archive, or a monthly crawl by rating band
• Lichess — a player's games, or a filtered monthly database export
• Lc0 training games, PGN Mentor, and TWIC

The Chess.com and Lichess player downloads share the same filters: only games you won, only checkmates, exclude bullet, exclude non-standard variants.

Organize large collections:

• Filter (Elo, ply count, checkmates, annotation cleanup), Sort, Split, Merge, Deduplicate, and Tour Breaker (pull real tournaments out of a giant dump).

Enrich the headers:

• ECO opening tags, missing Elo fill-in, event category, ply counts, Stockfish version normalization, and annotation stripping.

Analyze:

• PGN statistics overview, UCI/Stockfish engine analysis, Elegance scoring, and a checkmate-only filter.

Install

1. Open the Releases page.
2. Download the latest PgnTools-…-win-x64.exe.
3. Double-click it.

It's a single self-contained file — no installer, and no .NET runtime to install separately.

Build from source

Requires the .NET 10 SDK on Windows. To build the single-file executable:

.\build.cmd

That produces Build\PgnTools.Wpf.Release\PgnTools.exe. Or, while developing, just run it:

dotnet run --project PgnTools.Wpf/PgnTools.Wpf.csproj

Tech

.NET 10 · WPF (Fluent dark theme) · CommunityToolkit.Mvvm · Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection. The heart of the app is a streaming, low-allocation PGN reader/writer shared across every tool.

Project layout

• PgnTools.Wpf/ — the app
• PgnTools/ — the shared PGN engine, services, and view-models the app is built on
• Docs/ — per-tool notes and design docs
• build.cmd — one-step local build

Support

PGN Tools is free. If it saved you time — or it's the kind of thing you'd have happily paid for — you can drop a few bucks in the tip jar. It's genuinely appreciated and helps keep the project going.

License

See LICENSE.

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Releasing (for maintainers)

Releases are made with a button — nothing to remember:

1. Go to the repo's Actions tab → the Release workflow → Run workflow.
2. Type a version (e.g. v1.0.0) and click the green Run workflow button.
3. It builds the single-file exe and publishes a GitHub Release with it attached.

Regular commits and pushes never create a release — only that button does, so commit as often as you like.