NEdit Version 5.1.1, March 17, 2000 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 this version, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (see below). AUTHORS NEdit was written by Mark Edel, Joy Kyriakopulos, Christopher Conrad, Jim Clark, Arnulfo Zepeda-Navratil, Suresh Ravoor, Tony Balinski, Max Vohlken, Yunliang Yu, and Donna Reid. The regular expression matching routines used in NEdit are adapted (with permission) from original code written by Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto. 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, and Seak, Teng-Fong. NEdit sources, executables, additional documentation, and contributed software are available from the nedit web site at http://nedit.org. 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. 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 below for more details. VERSION 5.1 Version 5.1 is the first release of NEdit under the GNU General Public License, and the first release to be done entirely by volunteer effort. The most significant enhancements in this release are: * New regular expression code, boosts highlighting performance by 40%, and introduces many new and powerful features to regular expression operations and syntax highlighting. * Incremental search, and optional search bar. * New ctags code with full support for Exuberant Ctags, better handling of tag collisions, multiple tag file support, on-demand loading of tag files, and automatic reload of modified tag files. * Optional display of line numbers along the left side of the text. * NEdit can now read and write MS DOS format files. * New built-in syntax highlighting patterns for Lex, PostScript, SQL, and Matlab, and improved SGML/HTML and Java patterns. Many minor improvements to other patterns. * Improved international character set input * New macro subroutines: list_dialog, getenv, set_language_mode. * Optional warnings about external modifications to files * Clearcase awareness * Session manager restart capability There are also many smaller improvements and bug fixes, see the release notes for details. BUILDING NEDIT Pre-built executables will be available for most major Unix and VMS systems, so check the nedit web page (http://nedit.org), first. Building NEdit requires the Motif GUI library, libXm.a, which is a standard part of commercial Unix systems, but which requires separate installation on Linux and other free Unix variants. A free version of Motif, called Lesstif, is now available and stable enough to run NEdit reasonably well on these systems. If you are using Lesstif, you must have Lesstif .89.4 or greater. Older versions don't work very well. See the Lesstif section under PLATFORM SPECIFIC ISSUES for details. The two directories called source and util contain the sources for NEdit. Util should be built first, followed by source. The makefile in this 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 this 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 an executable called nedit 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. 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, check the nedit web site at: http://nedit.org for more contributed Makefiles. If you can't find one that's close, start from Makefile.generic. See the comments in Makefile.generic for more porting information. Building NEdit on VMS Systems Command files are provided for compiling and linking files in the source and util directories. comutil.com compiles the files in the util directory and produces two library files, vmsutils.olb and libutil.olb. comnedit.com compiles and links the files in the source directory to produce the nedit.exe executable. 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. On VMS systems, nedit must be defined as a foreign command so that it 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 To use NEdit in client/server mode, you also need the nedit client program, nc, which, again, needs no special installation, except in the VMS case, as above. On some systems, the name nc may conflict with an existing program. In that case, choose a different name for the executable and simply rename it. The recommend alternative is "ncl". RUNNING NEDIT 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: % setenv DISPLAY devicename:0 where devicename is the network node name of the workstation or X terminal where you are typing. On VMS systems, the equivalent command is: $ set display/create/node=devicename 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." PLATFORM SPECIFIC ISSUES Systems with Lesstif, rather than Motif libraries As of Lesstif .89.4, NEdit is very stable with Lesstif. .89.9 gets a bit less stable again but is still quite useable. You can get the latest lesstif version from http://lesstif.org. If you are having trouble building with Lesstif, remember there are pre-compiled statically linked executables available from http://nedit.org. Known bugs in NEdit linked with Lesstif are: 1) Unlikely but possible: frozen windows which do not take keyboard focus. (.89.9) 2) Some dialogs which are intended to be modal (prevent other activity while up) are not, and doing other actions while these dialogs are up can cause trouble (.89.9) 3) Switching to continuous wrap mode, sometimes the horizontal scroll remains partially drawn after the change, rather than disappearing completely as it should. (.89.9) 4) In file selection dialogs, typing filenames in to the alphabetical file and directory lists does not move the list selection cursor beyond the originally displayed range of files, so typing part of a filename and then navigating with arrows doesn't always work well. (fixed as of .89.9) 5) Secondary selection operations are not yet supported in text fields. 6) Menu mnemonics don't work (fixed as of .89.9) 7) The escape key accelerator for "Cancel" and "Dismiss" buttons does not work in most dialogs. (fixed as of .89.9) 8) The long, unbroken, lines found in some highlight patterns don't wrap properly in the syntax highlighting dialog. (fixed as of .89.9) Linux Systems The default key bindings for arrow keys in fvwm interfere with some of the arrow key bindings in NEdit, particularly, Ctrl+Arrow and Alt+Arrow. You may want to re-bind them either in NEdit (see Customizing -> Key Binding in the Help menu) or in fvwm in your .fvwmrc file. Some older Linux distributions are missing the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB file, which is necessary for running Motif programs. When XKeysymDB is missing, NEdit will spew screenfulls of messages about translation table syntax errors, and many keys won't work. You can obtain a copy of the XKeysymDB file from the contrib sub-directory of the NEdit distribution directory. SGI Systems Beginning with IRIX 6.3, SGI is distributing a customized version of NEdit along with their operating system releases. Their installation uses an app-defaults file (/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/NEdit) which overrides the default settings in any new nedit version that you install, and may result in missing accelerator keys or cosmetic appearance glitches. If you are re-installing NEdit for the entire system, just remove the existing app- defaults file. If you want to run a newer copy individually, get a copy of the app-defaults file for this version the contrib sub-directory of the distribution directory for this version on ftp.nedit.org (/pub/<version>/ contrib/nedit.app-defaults), and install it in your home directory or set XAPPLRESDIR or XUSERFILESEARCHPATH to point to a directory and install it there. In all cases, the file should be named simply NEdit. No additional installation or resource settings are necessary on IRIX systems before 6.3 HP-UX Systems If you are using HPVUE and have trouble setting colors, for example part of the menu bar stubornly remains at whatever HPVUE's default is, try setting: nedit*useColorObj: False IBM AIX Systems Due to an optimizer bug in IBM's C compiler, the file, textDisp.c, must be compiled without optimization on some AIX systems. Solaris (SunOS 5.3 and beyond) Systems The nedit_solaris executable may require the environment variable OPENWINHOME to be set to the directory where Open Windows is installed. If this is not set properly, NEdit will spew screenfulls of messages about translation table syntax errors. Solaris 2.4 -- Add -DDONT_HAVE_GLOB to the CFLAGS line in Makefile.solaris. Solaris 2.5 -- Solaris 2.5 systems were shipped with a bad shared Motif library, in which the file selection dialog (Open, Save, Save As, Include, etc.) shows long path names in the file list, but no horizontal scroll bar, and no way to read the actual file names. Depending on your system, the patch is one of ID# 103461-07, # 102226-19, or # 103186-21. It affects all Motif based programs which use the library. If you can't patch your system, you might want to just try the nedit_sunos executable (from ftp.nedit.org /pub/<version>), which is statically linked with a good Motif. You can also set the X resource: nedit.stdOpenDialog to True, which at least gives you a text field where you can enter file names by hand. Solaris 2.6 -- If you're experiencing performance problems (windows come up slowly), the patch for Sun's shared Motif library is ID# 105284-04. Installing the patch alone will improve nedit's performance dramatically. The patch also enables a resource, *XmMenuReduceGrabs. Setting this to True will eliminate the delay completely. SunOS 4.x Systems On some SunOS systems, NEdit will also complain about translation table syntax errors. This happens when Motif can't access the keysym database, usually located in the file /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB. If this file exists on your system, but NEdit fails to locate it properly, you can set the environment variable XKEYSYMDB to point to the file. If you can't find the file, or if some of the errors persist despite setting XKEYSYMDB, there is a XKeysymDB which you can use to update or replace your /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB file available in the contrib sub-directory of the NEdit distribution directory. If you don't want to change your existing XKeysymDB file, make a local copy and set XKEYSYMDB to point to it. If you find that some of the labeled keys on your keyboard are not properly bound to the corresponding action in NEdit, try the following: 1) Get a copy of motifbind.sun (for Sun standard keyboards), or motifbind.sun_at (for Sun PC style keyboards) from the NEdit contrib directory on ftp.nedit.org:/pub/<version>/contrib. 2) Copy it to a file called .motifbind in your home directory. 3) Shutdown and restart your X server. COMPATIBILITY WITH PREVIOUS VERSIONS Existing .nedit Files NEdit 5.1 makes significant changes to the syntax of regular expressions. Mostly, these are upward compatible, but two changes; introducing the brace operator, and changing the meaning of \0; are not. Brace characters must now be escaped with backslash, and & must be used in place of \0 in substitutions. NEdit 5.1 employs a new built-in upgrade mechanism which will automatically detect pre-5.1 .nedit files and fix regular expressions which appear in user-defined highlight patterns. The automatic upgrade mechanism, however, can not fix regular expression problems within user-defined macros. If you have a macro which is failing under NEdit 5.1, you will have to fix it by hand. If you are upgrading from a pre-5.0 version of NEdit, there are significant changes to the macro language, and you are best off simply editing out the nedit.macroCommands section of your .nedit file, generating a new .nedit file, and then re-introducing your user-written commands into the new file. Most macros written for previous versions will function properly under the new macro language. The most common problems with old macros is lack of a terminating newline on the last line of the macro, and the addition of "<", ">", and now "{" to the regular expression syntax. These characters must now be escaped with \ (backslash). Also, if you have been using a font other than the default for the text portion of your NEdit windows, be sure to check the Preferences -> Default Settings -> Text Font dialog, and select highlighting fonts which match your primary font in size. Matching in height is desirable, but not essential, and sometimes impossible to achive on some systems. When fonts don't match in height, turning on syntax highlighting will cause the window size to change slightly. NEdit can handle unmatched font sizes (width), but leaving them unmatched means sometimes columns and indentation don't line up (as with proportional fonts). FURTHER INFORMATION More information is available in the file nedit.doc in this kit, from NEdit's on-line help system, and from the enclosed FAQ file. There is also a web page for NEdit at: http://nedit.org. For discussion with other NEdit users, or to receive notification of new releases and news about news, you can subscribe to one or both of the nedit mailing lists, discuss@nedit.org, and announce@nedit.org. The NEdit on-line help has information on subscribing under Help -> Mailing Lists. REPORTING BUGS The nedit developers subscribe to both discuss@nedit.org and develop@nedit.org, either of which may be used for reporting bugs. If you're not sure, or you think the report might be of interest to the general nedit user community, send the report to discuss@nedit.org. If it's something obvious and boring, like we misspelled "anemometer" in the on-line help, send it to develop. If you don't want to subscribe to these lists, please add a note to your mail about cc'ing you on responses. GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 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We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software. Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow. GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION 0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you". Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does. 1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program. You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. 2. 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