1 NEdit Version 5.5, October 2004
3 $Id: README,v 1.48 2005/05/27 16:49:00 edg Exp $
6 NEdit is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which combines a
7 standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the thorough functionality
8 and stability required by users who edit text eight hours a day. It provides
9 intensive support for development in a wide variety of languages, text
10 processors, and other tools, but at the same time can be used productively by
11 just about anyone who needs to edit text.
14 As of version 5.1, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU
15 General Public License:
17 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
18 the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
19 Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
22 In addition, as a special exception to the GNU GPL, the copyright holders give
23 permission to link the code of this program with the Motif and Open Motif
24 libraries (or with modified versions of these that use the same license), and
25 distribute linked combinations including the two. You must obey the GNU General
26 Public License in all respects for all of the code used other than linking with
27 Motif/Open Motif. If you modify this file, you may extend this exception to your
28 version of the file, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to
29 do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
31 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
32 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
33 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
35 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License in the file
36 COPYRIGHT as part of this distribution; if not, write to the Free Software
37 Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
40 NEdit sources, executables, additional documentation, and contributed software
41 are available from the NEdit web site at http://nedit.org.
46 NEdit was written by Mark Edel, Joy Kyriakopulos, Christopher Conrad,
47 Jim Clark, Arnulfo Zepeda-Navratil, Suresh Ravoor, Tony Balinski, Max
48 Vohlken, Yunliang Yu, Donna Reid, Arne Førlie, Eddy De Greef, Steve
49 LoBasso, Alexander Mai, Scott Tringali, Thorsten Haude, Steve Haehn,
50 Andrew Hood, Nathaniel Gray, and TK Soh.
52 The regular expression matching routines used in NEdit are adapted (with
53 permission) from original code written by Henry Spencer at the University of
56 The Microline widgets are inherited from the Mozilla project.
58 Syntax highlighting patterns and smart indent macros were contributed
59 by: Simon T. MacDonald, Maurice Leysens, Matt Majka, Alfred Smeenk,
60 Alain Fargues, Christopher Conrad, Scott Markinson, Konrad Bernloehr,
61 Ivan Herman, Patrice Venant, Christian Denat, Philippe Couton, Max Vohlken,
62 Markus Schwarzenberg, Himanshu Gohel, Steven C. Kapp, Michael Turomsha,
63 John Fieber, Chris Ross, Nathaniel Gray, Joachim Lous, Mike Duigou,
64 Seak Teng-Fong, Joor Loohuis, Mark Jones, and Niek van den Berg.
69 Version 5.5 offers one major new feature along with a few others:
71 - Tabbed Windows (How long has this been on the wish list? :-)
72 - A menu item for enabling auto-scrolling
73 - Find and Clear buttons for the interactive search bar
74 - Improved Latex & Python syntax highlighting patterns
75 - Superuser receives a warning when trying to overwrite a read-only file
76 - Various bug fixes and performance improvements
78 See the ReleaseNotes file for a more detailed description of these new features
79 and a list of bugs fixed in this version.
84 Pre-built executables will be available for many operating systems, including
85 most major Unix and VMS systems. Check out the NEdit web page at
89 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:
91 - ANSI C89 system (compiler, headers, libraries)
92 - make utility (eg, GNU make)
93 - X11R5 development stuff (headers, libraries), or newer
94 - Motif 1.2 or above (Motif 1.1 might work, but is no longer supported)
95 This GUI library is a standard part on most systems which have an
96 X11 installation. Most commercial Unix systems feature this, others may
97 require a separate installation.
98 A "free" (LGPL'ed) alternative to Motif, called LessTif, is available.
99 See the LessTif section under PLATFORM SPECIFIC ISSUES for details.
101 Optionally one may use:
103 - yacc (or GNU bison)
106 The two directories called 'source' and 'util' contain the sources for NEdit.
107 'util' should be built first, followed by 'source'. The makefile in NEdit's
108 root directory can be used to build both in sequence if your system is one of
109 the supported machines and no modifications are necessary to the makefiles. To
110 build NEdit from the root directory, issue the command: 'make <machine-type>';
111 where <machine-type> is one of suffixes of a makefile in the directory
112 'makefiles'. For example, to build the Silicon Graphics version, type:
116 If everything works properly, this will produce two executables called
117 'nedit' and 'nc' in the directory called 'source'.
120 The Source Directories
122 Since executables are already available for the supported systems, you are
123 probably not just rebuilding an existing configuration, and need to know more
124 about how the directories are organized.
126 The util directory builds a library file called libNUtil.a, which is later
127 linked with the code in the source directory to create the nedit executable.
129 The makefiles in both source directories consist of two parts, a machine
130 dependent part and a machine independent part. The machine dependent makefiles
131 can be found in the directory called 'makefiles', and contain machine specific
132 header information. They invoke a common machine independent part called
133 Makefile.common (which in turn includes also Makefile.dependencies).
134 To compile the files in either of these directories, copy or link one of the
135 system-specific makefiles from the directory 'makefiles' into the directory,
136 and issue the command:
138 make -f Makefile.<machine-type>
140 (where <machine-type> is the makefile suffix). Alternatively, you can
141 name the file 'Makefile' and simply type "make".
143 If no makefile exists for your system, you should start from Makefile.generic,
144 which is extensively commented. Contact the developer at develop@nedit.org for
148 Building NEdit on VMS Systems
150 A command file is provided for compiling and linking files from all
151 source directories. To build on OpenVMS change directory into
152 [.makefiles] and run 'buildvms.com'.
156 Some C preprocessor macros may be used to en/disable certain parts
157 of the code. Usually this correponds to some non-important features
158 being selected or certain workarounds for platform-specifc problems.
159 Those which might be useful on more than one platform are documented
160 in makefiles/Makefile.generic.
162 Note that a special compilation flag, namely REPLACE_SCOPE, is currently
163 available. Its purpose is to allow the evaluation of two alternative
164 (but functionally equivalent) Replace/Find dialog box layouts.
165 By default, NEdit is built with a Replace/Find dialog containing 2 rows
166 of push buttons. Compiling with the REPLACE_SCOPE flag enables an
167 alternative layout with a row of radio buttons for selecting the scope of
168 the replace operations. Eventually, one of these alternatives will
169 probably disappear, but up to now, the NEdit developers have not been able
170 to decide which one to drop. Please give them both a try and let us know
171 which one you prefer (via the discuss mailing list, for instance).
173 Another compilation flag, HAVE__XMVERSIONSTRING, adds additional
174 information about the Motif version in the menu item "Help->Version" or
175 the command line option "-version". Whether this is available on your
176 system depends on the Motif implementation. It is known to work with
177 OpenMotif 2.1.30, and Motif on Solaris 2.6 and AIX 4.3.3.
181 NEdit consists of a single, stand-alone executable file which does not require
182 any special installation. To install NEdit on Unix systems, simply put the
183 nedit executable in your path.
185 To use NEdit in client/server mode (which is the recommended way of using it),
186 you also need the nedit client program, nc, which, again, needs no special
187 installation. On some systems, the name nc may conflict with the 'netcat'
188 program. In that case, choose a different name for the executable and simply
189 rename it. The recommend alternative is 'ncl'. Don't forget to put the
190 man-pages for nedit and nc into a place where your man command is able to find
191 them (e.g. /usr/man/man1/nedit.1), and don't forget to rename nc.man to ncl.man
192 if you've renamed nc to ncl.
194 On VMS systems, nedit and nc must be defined as a foreign commands so that they
195 can process command line arguments. For example, if nedit.exe were in the
196 directory mydir on the disk called mydev, adding the following line to your
197 login.com file would define the nedit command:
199 $ ned*it :== $mydev:[mydir]nedit.exe
203 To run NEdit, simply type 'nedit', optionally followed by the name of a file
204 or files to edit. On-line help is available from the pulldown menu on the far
205 right of the menu bar. For more information on the syntax of the nedit command
206 line, look under the heading of "NEdit Command Line".
208 The recommended way to use NEdit, though, is in client/server mode, invoked by
209 the nc executable. It allows you to edit multiple files within the same
210 instance of NEdit (but still in multiple windows). This saves memory (only one
211 process keeps running), and enables additional functionality (such as find &
212 replace accross multiple windows). See "Server Mode and nc" in the help menu
213 for more information.
215 If you are accessing a host Unix system from a remote workstation or X
216 terminal, you need to set the Unix environment variable for your display:
218 % setenv DISPLAY devicename:0
220 % export DISPLAY=devicename:0
222 where devicename is the network node name (hostname) of the workstation or X
223 terminal where you are typing.
224 On VMS systems, the equivalent command is:
226 $ set display/create/node=devicename
230 PLATFORM SPECIFIC ISSUES
232 Systems with LessTif, rather than Motif libraries
234 As of Lesstif 0.93.18, NEdit is very stable with Lesstif.
235 You can get the latest LessTif version from http://www.lesstif.org.
236 If you are having trouble building or running NEdit with LessTif,
237 remember there are pre-compiled statically linked executables available
239 Known bugs which might show off in NEdit linked with LessTif include:
241 1) Some dialogs which are intended to be modal (prevent other activity
242 while up) are not, and doing other actions while these dialogs are
243 up can cause trouble (.89.9+)
245 2) Switching to continuous wrap mode, sometimes the horizontal scroll
246 remains partially drawn after the change, rather than disappearing
247 completely as it should. (.89.9+)
249 3) Secondary selection operations are not yet supported in text fields.
251 4) Status bar is blank after usage of Incremental Search field
257 Red Hat Linux, as of version 8.0, no longer automatically reads X resources out
258 of the ~/.Xdefaults file. Instead, it reads a file named ~/.Xresources. Any
259 customizations stored in ~/.Xdefaults will not be honored, for all X
260 applications. To fix this, copy the resources into ~/.Xdefaults, or link the
263 The default key bindings for arrow keys in fvwm interfere with some of the
264 arrow key bindings in NEdit, particularly, Ctrl+Arrow and Alt+Arrow. You
265 may want to re-bind them either in NEdit (see Customizing -> Key Binding
266 in the Help menu) or in fvwm in your .fvwmrc file.
268 Some older Linux distributions are missing the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
269 file, which is necessary for running Motif programs. When XKeysymDB is
270 missing, NEdit will spew screenfulls of messages about translation table syntax
271 errors, and many keys won't work. You can obtain a copy of the XKeysymDB file
272 from the contrib sub-directory of the NEdit distribution directory.
277 NEdit is an X Window application and thus requires an X Window server, such as
278 Apple's X11.app or XFree86.org's XDarwin, to be running.
280 If you are building NEdit yourself, you will probably need to edit
281 makefiles/Makefile.macosx to select the correct version of Motif. There are
282 comments in the makefile to help you do this correctly. Note that the
283 developers use the OpenMotif 2.1.30 package available (at the time of writing)
284 at: http://msg.ucsf.edu:8100/~eric/
289 Beginning with IRIX 6.3, SGI is distributing a customized version of NEdit
290 along with their operating system releases. Their installation uses an
291 app-defaults file (/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/NEdit) which overrides the
292 default settings in any new nedit version that you install, and may result in
293 missing accelerator keys or cosmetic appearance glitches. If you are
294 re-installing NEdit for the entire system, just remove the existing app-
295 defaults file. If you want to run a newer copy individually, get a copy of
296 the app-defaults file for this version the contrib sub-directory of the
297 distribution directory for this version on ftp.nedit.org (/pub/<version>/
298 contrib/nedit.app-defaults), and install it in your home directory or set
299 the environment variables XAPPLRESDIR or XUSERFILESEARCHPATH to point
300 to a directory and install it there. In all cases, the file should be
301 named simply 'NEdit'.
303 No additional installation or resource settings are necessary on IRIX systems
309 If you are using HPVUE and have trouble setting colors, for example part
310 of the menu bar stubornly remains at whatever HPVUE's default is, try setting:
312 nedit*useColorObj: False
317 Due to an optimizer bug in IBM's C compiler, the file, textDisp.c, must be
318 compiled without optimization on some AIX systems.
321 Solaris (SunOS 5.3 and beyond) Systems
323 The nedit_solaris executable may require the environment variable OPENWINHOME
324 to be set to the directory where Open Windows is installed. If this is not set
325 properly, NEdit will spew screenfulls of messages about translation table
328 Solaris 2.4 -- Add -DDONT_HAVE_GLOB to the CFLAGS line in Makefile.solaris.
330 Solaris 2.5 -- Solaris 2.5 systems were shipped with a bad shared Motif
331 library, in which the file selection dialog (Open, Save, Save As, Include,
332 etc.) shows long path names in the file list, but no horizontal scroll bar,
333 and no way to read the actual file names. Depending on your system, the
334 patch is one of ID# 103461-07, # 102226-19, or # 103186-21. It affects all
335 Motif based programs which use the library. If you can't patch your system,
336 you might want to just try the nedit_sunos executable (from ftp.nedit.org
337 /pub/<version>), which is statically linked with a good Motif. You can also
338 set the X resource: nedit.stdOpenDialog to True, which at least gives you a
339 text field where you can enter file names by hand.
341 Solaris 2.6 -- If you're experiencing performance problems (windows come up
342 slowly), the patch for Sun's shared Motif library is ID# 105284-04. Installing
343 the patch alone will improve nedit's performance dramatically. The patch also
344 enables a resource, *XmMenuReduceGrabs. Setting this to True will eliminate the
349 On some SunOS systems, NEdit will also complain about translation table syntax
350 errors. This happens when Motif can't access the keysym database, usually
351 located in the file /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB. If this file exists on your
352 system, but NEdit fails to locate it properly, you can set the environment
353 variable XKEYSYMDB to point to the file. If you can't find the file, or if
354 some of the errors persist despite setting XKEYSYMDB, there is a XKeysymDB
355 which you can use to update or replace your /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB file
356 available in the contrib sub-directory of the NEdit distribution directory.
357 If you don't want to change your existing XKeysymDB file, make a local copy
358 and set XKEYSYMDB to point to it.
360 If you find that some of the labeled keys on your keyboard are not properly
361 bound to the corresponding action in NEdit, try the following:
363 1) Get a copy of motifbind.sun (for Sun standard keyboards), or
364 motifbind.sun_at (for Sun PC style keyboards) from the NEdit contrib
365 directory on ftp.nedit.org:/pub/<version>/contrib.
366 2) Copy it to a file called .motifbind in your home directory.
367 3) Shutdown and restart your X server.
370 COMPATIBILITY WITH PREVIOUS VERSIONS
372 Existing .nedit Files
374 As of version 5.1, NEdit employs a built-in upgrade mechanism which will
375 automatically detects .nedit files of older versions. In general, NEdit
376 will try to convert and insert entries to match the latest version.
377 However, in certain cases where the user has customized the default entries,
378 NEdit will leave them untouched (except for possible syntactic conversions).
379 As a result, the latest syntax highlighting patterns for certain languages may
380 not get activated, for instance, if the user has customized the entries. The
381 latest default patterns can always be activated through the
382 Preferences->Syntax Highlighting->Recognition Patterns menu, though.
384 Next, some version specific upgrading issues are listed. Note that
385 non-incremental upgrading (eg., from 5.0 to 5.2) is supported too.
387 * Upgrading from 5.4 to 5.5
389 - Changes in the widget hierarchy, possibly effecting resource settings
391 In NEdit 5.4 and below, the widget hierarchy consisted of a separate
392 widget tree for each window. This was rather unconventional and caused
393 certain problems. In 5.5, the hierarchy was changed such that all widgets
394 belong to a single tree with a single root widget.
396 For instance, with 5.4, the top of the widget hierarchy for a 2-window
397 NEdit session looks as follows:
400 +-- XmMainWindow main
403 +-- XmMainWindow main
405 In 5.5, the same session results in the following tree:
408 +-- TopLevelShell textShell
409 | +-- XmMainWindow main
410 +-- TopLevelShell textShell
411 +-- XmMainWindow main
413 Users with advanced X-resource settings may be affected by this
414 change and may have to adapt their resource specifications.
416 - Minor change to the regular expression word boundary semantics
418 In 5.4, the semantics for word boundary regular expressions ('<', '>',
419 and '\B') were changed to behave in a more intuitive way (see Upgrading
420 from 5.3 to 5.4 below). However, this introduced an inconsistency between
421 the regular expressions and several other places in NEdit where word
422 boundaries were taken into account. Therefore, the changes were partially
423 reverted to restore consistency, but without giving up the benefits of the
424 more intuitive word boundary definition. More in particular, a boundary
425 between two characters is now considered to be a word boundary only if
426 exactly one of the characters is a delimiter.
427 This change will have little or no consequences for most users.
429 * Upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4
433 Basic colors, like the text foreground and background, are now true
434 preferences. A new dialog (Preferences > Default Settings > Colors) is
435 provided to change them, previously only changeable from X resources.
436 Upon starting, NEdit will migrate any custom colors you have set from
437 the old X resources. Most users will not need to do anything.
439 However, if you used X resources to dynamically change the colors on
440 different invocations, you will need to use the new application-level
441 resources instead. See the .nedit file for details.
443 In 5.3, color resources needed to be qualified by "nedit*" in order to
444 prevent problems when the deepest color visual was not the default.
445 This is no longer necessary, and the qualification may be removed.
447 - New location of configuration files
449 The default location and name of NEdit's resource files has been changed.
450 The most important change is the fact that they can now be stored in a
451 custom directory, defined by the NEDIT_HOME environment variable. If the
452 variable is not set, the directory defaults to ~/.nedit.
453 The files have been renamed as follows:
455 ~/.nedit -> $NEDIT_HOME/nedit.rc
456 ~/.neditmacro -> $NEDIT_HOME/autoload.nm
457 ~/.neditdb -> $NEDIT_HOME/nedit.history
459 For backward compatibility reasons, NEdit continues to use the old
460 convention when these files are already present. No attempt is made
461 to force the user to adopt the new convention.
463 Users that would like to migrate to the new setup can do so manually
464 by moving and renaming the files.
466 - Changed regular expression word boundary semantics and its effect
467 on the syntax highlighting patterns.
469 During the 5.4 development cycle, it was noted that the implementation
470 of NEdit's regular expression word boundary matching was rather
471 unconventional. More in particular, the '<', '>', and '\B' patterns
472 interpreted the boundary between any two characters of which at least
473 one was not a word character as a word boundary. A striking effect of this
474 was that the boundary between two spaces was considered to be a word
475 boundary, which is obviously rather unintuitive. This has been corrected
476 in 5.4: the boundary between two characters is a word boundary, only if
477 exactly one of them is a word character.
479 Several of the built-in syntax highlighting patterns (implicitly) relied
480 on the old word boundary interpretation and they have been corrected too.
482 However, if the user has customized some of these buggy built-in
483 highlighting patterns, the automatic upgrading routines will NOT upgrade
484 them in order not to loose any customizations. It is left up to the user
485 to correct his/her customized patterns manually (using the corrected
486 built-in patterns as a guideline).
488 The following is a list of all language modes and patterns that have been
491 Ada: Based Numeric Literals
492 Awk: Numeric constant
493 C++: numeric constant
495 CSS: property, selector pseudo class
496 Java: decimal const, case numeric const
498 Lex: numeric constant, markers
499 Matlab: Numeric const
500 NEdit Macro: Built-in Vars, Numeric Const
501 Pascal: TP Numeric Values:
502 Perl: dq string, sq string, bq string, subroutine call,
504 PostScript: Number, Operator1
506 SQL: data types, keywords2
507 Sh Ksh Bash: keywords, built ins
509 VHDL: Numeric Literals
510 Verilog: Reserved WordsA, Numeric Literals, Delay Word,
512 XML: element declaration keyword
513 Yacc: numeric constant, percent keyword, markers
515 So, if the user has customized the highlighting definitions for any of
516 these language modes (not restricted to the listed patterns), (s)he is
517 strongly advised to restore the default patterns in the syntax
518 highlighting dialog and to re-apply his/her customizations.
520 Moreover, it is advised to check any custom language modes for potential
521 boundary matching problems as described above.
523 * Upgrading from 5.2 to 5.3
525 There are no major changes in the format of the .nedit file for version
526 5.2. Users that have customized the X Resources syntax highlighting
527 pattern may consider restoring the default patterns, as they resolve
528 a performance issue when editing the .nedit file itself, for instance.
530 * Upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2
532 There are no major changes in the format of the .nedit file for version
533 5.2. NEdit will try to insert additional entries for the newly supported
534 language modes and syntax highlighting patterns (CSS, Regex, and XML) and
535 highlight styles (Pointer, Regex, Warning).
537 Moreover, the formerly boolean 'showMatching' option will silently be
538 converted to a tri-state value.
540 Users that have customized some of the syntax highlighting patterns may
541 consider restoring the default patterns, as many of them have been improved
544 * Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1
546 NEdit 5.1 makes significant changes to the syntax of regular expressions.
547 Mostly, these are upward compatible, but two changes; introducing the brace
548 operator, and changing the meaning of \0; are not. Brace characters must now
549 be escaped with backslash, and & must be used in place of \0 in
552 NEdit 5.1 employs a built-in upgrade mechanism which will automatically
553 detect pre-5.1 .nedit files and fix regular expressions which appear in
554 user-defined highlight patterns. The automatic upgrade mechanism, however,
555 can not fix regular expression problems within user-defined macros. If you
556 have a macro which is failing under NEdit 5.1, you will have to fix it by
559 * Upgrading from pre-5.0
561 If you are upgrading from a pre-5.0 version of NEdit, there are significant
562 changes to the macro language, and you are best off simply editing out the
563 nedit.macroCommands section of your .nedit file, generating a new .nedit
564 file, and then re-introducing your user-written commands into the new file.
565 Most macros written for previous versions will function properly under the
566 new macro language. The most common problems with old macros is lack of a
567 terminating newline on the last line of the macro, and the addition of "<",
568 ">", and now "{" to the regular expression syntax. These characters must now
569 be escaped with \ (backslash). Also, if you have been using a font other
570 than the default for the text portion of your NEdit windows, be sure to
571 check the Preferences -> Default Settings -> Text Font dialog, and select
572 highlighting fonts which match your primary font in size. Matching in height
573 is desirable, but not essential, and sometimes impossible to achive on some
574 systems. When fonts don't match in height, turning on syntax highlighting
575 will cause the window size to change slightly. NEdit can handle unmatched
576 font sizes (width), but leaving them unmatched means sometimes columns and
577 indentation don't line up (as with proportional fonts).
581 More information is available in the file nedit.doc in this kit, from NEdit's
582 on-line help system, the man-pages and from the enclosed FAQ file.
583 There is also a web page for NEdit at: http://nedit.org. For discussion with
584 other NEdit users, or to receive notification of new releases you can
585 subscribe to one or more of the NEdit mailing lists, announce@nedit.org,
586 discuss@nedit.org or develop@nedit.org. The NEdit on-line help has information
587 on subscribing under Help -> Mailing Lists.
593 The preferred way to report bugs is to submit an entry on our web-based
596 http://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit/
598 The NEdit developers subscribe to both discuss@nedit.org and develop@nedit.org,
599 either of which may be used for reporting bugs. If you're not sure, or you
600 think the report might be of interest to the general NEdit user community,
601 send the report to discuss@nedit.org. If it's something obvious and boring,
602 like we misspelled "anemometer" in the on-line help, send it to develop. If
603 you don't want to subscribe to these lists, please add a note to your mail
604 about cc'ing you on responses.