nedit-ng

nedit-ng is a Qt port of the Nirvana Editor (NEdit) version 5.6. It is intended to be a drop in replacement for nedit in every practical way, just as on many systems /usr/bin/vi is now a symlink to /usr/bin/vim.

Because it is a true port of the original code, it (at least for now) inherits some (but not all) of the limitations of the original. On the other hand, some aspects have been improved simply by the fact that it is now a Qt application.

Requirements:

Compiling:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

Help Documentation

NEdit had extensive help texts, which have been carefully updated and made available online here: https://eteran.github.io/nedit-ng/

Inherited Limitations:

• Text display is still ASCII only (for now).
• Regex engine is the original nedit proprietary implementation. This was kept for a few reasons:
  1. NEdit's syntax is slightly non-standard, and I wanted to keep things backwards compatible for now.
  2. NEdit's syntax highligher has very carefully created regex's which result in things being highlighted in a way that I (and I assume other nedit users) have grown to appreciate. A change in regex engine would likely require a rework on the syntax highlighting algorithm.
  3. The original highligher has some insider information of the regex implementation which it uses in order to be more efficient. I could fake this information, but at the cost of efficiency.

Improvements already available:

• Bug fixes! Yes, NEdit 5.6 unfortunately has some bugs, some of which can result in a crash. Where possible, the new code has these fixed.
• Anti-aliased font rendering.
• Modern look and feel.
• Internally, counted strings are used instead of NUL terminated strings. This removes the need to have code that played games with substituting NUL characters mid-stream.
• Use of some C++ containers means many internal size limits are no longer present.
• Code as been reworked using modern C++ techniques using a toolkit with an active developer community, making it significantly easier for contributions to be made by the open source community.

The goal of the initial release is to be a nearly 1:1 port of the original NEdit. Now that we have achieved that goal. looking towards the future, some additional goals are:

• [x] Cross platform
• [x] Internationalization!
• [ ] Python/LUA scripting support in addition to the built-in macro system
• [ ] An improved preferences system
• [ ] Extensibility though plugins
• [ ] Sessions, meaning that you can save and restore an edit session (such as several open tabs)