Nedit

                NEdit Version 5.7, January 2017

NEdit is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the thorough functionality and stability required by users who edit text eight hours a day. It provides intensive support for development in a wide variety of languages, text processors, and other tools, but at the same time can be used productively by just about anyone who needs to edit text.

As of version 5.1, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

In addition, as a special exception to the GNU GPL, the copyright holders give permission to link the code of this program with the Motif and Open Motif libraries (or with modified versions of these that use the same license), and distribute linked combinations including the two. You must obey the GNU General Public License in all respects for all of the code used other than linking with Motif/Open Motif. If you modify this file, you may extend this exception to your version of the file, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License in the file COPYRIGHT as part of this distribution; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

NEdit sources, executables, additional documentation, and contributed software are available from the NEdit web site at http://nedit.org.

AUTHORS

NEdit was written by Mark Edel, Joy Kyriakopulos, Christopher Conrad, Jim Clark, Arnulfo Zepeda-Navratil, Suresh Ravoor, Tony Balinski, Max Vohlken, Yunliang Yu, Donna Reid, Arne Førlie, Eddy De Greef, Steve LoBasso, Alexander Mai, Scott Tringali, Thorsten Haude, Steve Haehn, Andrew Hood, Nathaniel Gray, and TK Soh.

The regular expression matching routines used in NEdit are adapted (with permission) from original code written by Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto.

The Microline widgets are inherited from the Mozilla project.

Syntax highlighting patterns and smart indent macros were contributed by: Simon T. MacDonald, Maurice Leysens, Matt Majka, Alfred Smeenk, Alain Fargues, Christopher Conrad, Scott Markinson, Konrad Bernloehr, Ivan Herman, Patrice Venant, Christian Denat, Philippe Couton, Max Vohlken, Markus Schwarzenberg, Himanshu Gohel, Steven C. Kapp, Michael Turomsha, John Fieber, Chris Ross, Nathaniel Gray, Joachim Lous, Mike Duigou, Seak Teng-Fong, Joor Loohuis, Mark Jones, and Niek van den Berg.

VERSION 5.6

Version 5.6 is a maintenance release.

See the ReleaseNotes file for a more detailed description of these new features and a list of bugs fixed in this version.

BUILDING NEDIT

Pre-built executables will be available for many operating systems, including most major Unix and VMS systems. Check out the NEdit web page at

http://nedit.org

If you have downloaded a pre-built executable you can skip ahead to the section called INSTALLATION. Otherwise, the requirements to build NEdit from the sources are:

• ANSI C89 system (compiler, headers, libraries)
• make utility (eg, GNU make)
• X11R5 development stuff (headers, libraries), or newer
• Motif 1.2 or above (Motif 1.1 might work, but is no longer supported) This GUI library is a standard part on most systems which have an X11 installation. Most commercial Unix systems feature this, others may require a separate installation. A "free" (LGPL'ed) alternative to Motif, called LessTif, is available. See the LessTif section under PLATFORM SPECIFIC ISSUES for details.

Optionally one may use:

• yacc (or GNU bison)

The two directories called 'source' and 'util' contain the sources for NEdit. 'util' should be built first, followed by 'source'. The makefile in NEdit's root directory can be used to build both in sequence if your system is one of the supported machines and no modifications are necessary to the makefiles. To build NEdit from the root directory, issue the command: 'make <machine-type>'; where <machine-type> is one of suffixes of a makefile in the directory 'makefiles'. For example, to build the Silicon Graphics version, type:

make sgi

If everything works properly, this will produce two executables called 'nedit' and 'nc' in the directory called 'source'.

The Source Directories

Since executables are already available for the supported systems, you are probably not just rebuilding an existing configuration, and need to know more about how the directories are organized.

The util directory builds a library file called libNUtil.a, which is later linked with the code in the source directory to create the nedit executable.

The makefiles in both source directories consist of two parts, a machine dependent part and a machine independent part. The machine dependent makefiles can be found in the directory called 'makefiles', and contain machine specific header information. They invoke a common machine independent part called Makefile.common (which in turn includes also Makefile.dependencies). To compile the files in either of these directories, copy or link one of the system-specific makefiles from the directory 'makefiles' into the directory, and issue the command:

make -f Makefile.<machine-type>

(where <machine-type> is the makefile suffix). Alternatively, you can name the file 'Makefile' and simply type "make".

If no makefile exists for your system, you should start from Makefile.generic, which is extensively commented. Contact the developer at develop@nedit.org for help.

Building NEdit on VMS Systems

A command file is provided for compiling and linking files from all source directories. To build on OpenVMS change directory into [.makefiles] and run 'buildvms.com'.

Additional Settings

Some C preprocessor macros may be used to en/disable certain parts of the code. Usually this correponds to some non-important features being selected or certain workarounds for platform-specifc problems. Those which might be useful on more than one platform are documented in makefiles/Makefile.generic.

Note that a special compilation flag, namely REPLACE_SCOPE, is currently available. Its purpose is to allow the evaluation of two alternative (but functionally equivalent) Replace/Find dialog box layouts. By default, NEdit is built with a Replace/Find dialog containing 2 rows of push buttons. Compiling with the REPLACE_SCOPE flag enables an alternative layout with a row of radio buttons for selecting the scope of the replace operations. Eventually, one of these alternatives will probably disappear, but up to now, the NEdit developers have not been able to decide which one to drop. Please give them both a try and let us know which one you prefer (via the discuss mailing list, for instance).

Another compilation flag, HAVE__XMVERSIONSTRING, adds additional information about the Motif version in the menu item "Help->Version" or the command line option "-version". Whether this is available on your system depends on the Motif implementation. It is known to work with OpenMotif 2.1.30, and Motif on Solaris 2.6 and AIX 4.3.3.

INSTALLATION

NEdit consists of a single, stand-alone executable file which does not require any special installation. To install NEdit on Unix systems, simply put the nedit executable in your path.

To use NEdit in client/server mode (which is the recommended way of using it), you also need the nedit client program, nc, which, again, needs no special installation. On some systems, the name nc may conflict with the 'netcat' program. In that case, choose a different name for the executable and simply rename it. The recommend alternative is 'ncl'. Don't forget to put the man-pages for nedit and nc into a place where your man command is able to find them (e.g. /usr/man/man1/nedit.1), and don't forget to rename nc.man to ncl.man if you've renamed nc to ncl.

On VMS systems, nedit and nc must be defined as a foreign commands so that they can process command line arguments. For example, if nedit.exe were in the directory mydir on the disk called mydev, adding the following line to your login.com file would define the nedit command:

$ ned*it :== $mydev:[mydir]nedit.exe

RUNNING NEDIT

To run NEdit, simply type 'nedit', optionally followed by the name of a file or files to edit. On-line help is available from the pulldown menu on the far right of the menu bar. For more information on the syntax of the nedit command line, look under the heading of "NEdit Command Line".

The recommended way to use NEdit, though, is in client/server mode, invoked by the nc executable. It allows you to edit multiple files within the same instance of NEdit (but still in multiple windows). This saves memory (only one process keeps running), and enables additional functionality (such as find & replace accross multiple windows). See "Server Mode and nc" in the help menu for more information.

If you are accessing a host Unix system from a remote workstation or X terminal, you need to set the Unix environment variable for your display: csh: % setenv DISPLAY devicename:0 sh, ksh, bash, zsh: % export DISPLAY=devicename:0

where devicename is the network node name (hostname) of the workstation or X terminal where you are typing. On VMS systems, the equivalent command is:

    $ set display/create/node=devicename

PLATFORM SPECIFIC ISSUES

Systems with LessTif, rather than Motif