pgAdmin3 (community fork)

An actively-maintained fork of pgAdmin III, the classic native desktop administration tool for PostgreSQL. The official pgAdmin III project was retired in favor of the web-based pgAdmin 4, but this fork keeps the native wxWidgets application alive: fixing bugs against modern PostgreSQL versions and adding a substantial number of features power users have asked for over the years (see CHANGELOG.md for the full history).

Upstream (unmaintained) project: https://github.com/postgres/pgadmin3

What this fork adds over stock pgAdmin III

A few highlights out of many — see CHANGELOG.md for the complete, dated list:

• Query tool: auto-select the statement under the cursor, autosave tab contents, named/auto-loading bookmarks, multiple result-output windows, multi-column result sorting, variable substitution ($1, :name), PCRE-based text transformation dialog, word-hint autocomplete, join autocompletion via foreign keys, human-readable big numbers, and a "compare 2 cells" diff view.
• Context help: hypertext popup help for database objects with clickable navigation between functions, tables, and triggers.
• Server Status / Activity window: process highlighting, wait-event sampling (pg_wait_sampling), AWR-style reports, and a CSV log viewer with per-column filters and log-line grouping.
• Schema tooling: cross-server object comparison with HTML diff reports, GitLab-backed schema version control, B-tree index checking via amcheck, pgpro_scheduler job status integration.
• UI: SVG toolbar icons, per-server icon coloring, JSON-tree editor for the app's own settings file, HiDPI-aware builds.
• Platform support: native Windows, Linux, and macOS builds (Apple Silicon, Cocoa) — see below.

Supported platforms

Platform	Status	Build
Windows	Primary target, prebuilt .exe in Release/	Visual Studio project (pgAdmin3.vcxproj) or mingw cross-compile — see INSTALL_EN.txt
Linux	Actively maintained	make build (CMake under the hood) — see INSTALL_EN.txt
macOS	Stable, community-maintained	make build — see below and AGENTS.md

Requires PostgreSQL client libraries; the app itself connects to PostgreSQL 12+ and PostgresPro Enterprise, with incremental support added for newer server versions (13/15/16) as they've been released.

Building

This repo has a small Makefile wrapper around CMake that picks the right flow for your OS:

make            # show build help for your detected OS
make build      # configure + build (macOS: also assembles a .app bundle)
make run        # quick dev run (no packaging)
make clean      # remove build output

macOS

Pre-built binary via Homebrew Cask (Apple Silicon, arm64):

brew install heptau/tap/pgadmin3

Or build from source:

make build
open "build-macos/pgAdmin III.app"

The first from-source build needs a locally-built wxWidgets (Homebrew's bottle isn't compatible out of the box — see AGENTS.md for why and how to build one). Once that's in place, make build configures CMake, compiles, and assembles a real double-clickable .app bundle with its own icon and bundled libraries — no DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH needed at runtime.

Linux

make build
./build/pgAdmin3

Needs wxWidgets 3.2+, libxml2, libxslt, and PostgreSQL client/server dev headers. See INSTALL_EN.txt for exact package names and the mingw cross-compile recipe for producing a Windows build from Linux.

Windows

Open pgAdmin3.vcxproj in Visual Studio, or cross-compile from Linux with mingw — see INSTALL_EN.txt.

Repository layout

The source tree mirrors pgAdmin III's original module split: frm/ (top-level windows), dlg/ (property dialogs), ctl/ (custom controls), schema/ (database object model), gqb/ (graphical query builder), debugger/ (PL/pgSQL debugger), pgscript/ (scripting engine), slony/ and agent/ (Slony-I / pgAgent integrations), ogl/hotdraw (the ERD canvas toolkit), and utils/ (shared helpers).

Contributing / project notes

• CHANGELOG.md — full dated history of changes.
• AGENTS.md — working notes for the macOS port: how the local wxWidgets build is set up, known platform-specific gotchas, and the branching approach used to keep macOS-only changes easy to rebase against upstream.
• INSTALL.txt / INSTALL_EN.txt — detailed Linux/Windows build instructions (Russian/English).

License

Released under the PostgreSQL Licence, same as the original pgAdmin III project.