My private version of NEdit

April 2014

Nedit is my favorite editor not only for programming since more then 10 years. It is known to be a very sophisticated editor because

• it is perfectly integrated into the X11 windowing system. Independent editor sessions can be run simultaneously on multiple desktops, in multiple windows containing tabbed subwindows which finally may be split up into "panes". The sessions can be grouped together in so called servers, each server working on its own set of files in one or more windows.
  
  
• it is convenient for gui-less server installations (only a minimum of X11 libraries is required on the server)
  
  
• it has many powerful features for programming. Most notable is a configurable source code highlighting system. You can define highlighting patterns of your own and are not stuck with those more or less hardcoded as in many other editors.
  
  
• It can be highly customized via X11 resources and private editor settings.
  
  
• is has a very powerful and straightforward macro engine which allows to extend the editor with self defined functions. These may be simple shortcuts for a few menu or keyboard actions as well as complex macro systems performing ide tasks (save all modified files, run compiler, walk through error messages and jump to the error locations etc).
  
  

There are some serious issues with NEdit however:

• NEdit uses the Motif toolkit which may be considered to be somewhat outdated. NEdit is connected to X11 and Motif so tightly that it is rather impossible to switch to some other, perhaps more modern widget system.
  
  
• NEdit development has slowed down a decade ago (there has not been an official release since version 5.5 in 2004) and seems to have stopped at all in 2010. This is not neccesarily bad news as it sometimes may be better to leave a mature software as it is. On the other hand on NEdit's development site on Sourceforge there are many feature requests and dozens of patches which address nasty bugs or add interesting new features.
  
  
• For many years NEdit was built on Debian using LessTif. This was to replace OpenMotif due to some licensing reasons^*). The problem is LessTif never has reached a quality level to be an adequate replacement for OpenMotif. Development progress on LessTif is very slow and sometimes essential things get worse. The bug which crashed NEdit and others when pressing escape to close a menu existed for about three years. Other important issues are still unsolved (copy and paste frequently fails, especially but not only in dialogs, focus problems with dialogs leading to temporary program hangs etc).
  
  At least the bugs mentioned here render NEdit as it came with Debian releases 5 ... 7 nearly unusable. New users who may give NEdit a first try will likely evaluate it as crap (not knowing the problems come from LessTif, not NEdit). The impact on NEdit's user base on the long term is obvious.
  

*) Debian 5 was the last version containing OpenMotif in the non-free section (Version 2.2.3-4).  Debian releases 6 and 7 are missing OpenMotif at all. Still the binary packages from Debian 5 can be installed on Debian 6 and 7 via "dpkg -i".

What I have done:

• Since I ever have enjoyed NEdit (starting with version 5.4, later version 5.5, from SuSE 7.x and later), I tried to work with that one coming with Debian 4 (1:5.5-2). To my surprise it turned out to be nearly unusable (see above), but since I knew NEdit from SuSE I decided to recompile the package using OpenMotif, resulting the same quality editor as I used to have on SuSE.
  

• After NEdit had been dropped from SuSE I assumed its time is over and I started to look for an replacement. But none of the alternatives I inspected satisfied my needs. (I heavily depend on self written highlighting patterns and macros.) So I decided to run my own NEdit package. Based on the 1:5.5-2 version from Debian I created my local derivatives 1:5.5-2.1 (2008) and 1:5.5-2.2 (2010), implementing only minor, but useful changes.
  
  
• In September 2012 I just for curiousity walked through NEdit's patchlist on Sourceforge and found two interesting entries: Patch #2337783 "EWMH raise support" and patch #2190783 "move tab by drag and drop". After applying I had NEdit 2:5.5-2.3 (incremented epoch to prevent Debian from overwriting my version).
   
• In November 2012 I took a look on NEdit 1:5.6~cvs20081118-7 from Debian. I added patches #2337783 ("EWMH raise support") and #2190783 (move tab by drag and drop). This could be done without a problem.
  
  More or less by accident I found out, the so called Microline folder widgets (which implement the tabbed interface) allow more than one tab row. To enable it only a X11 resource setting is needed (nedit*XmLFolder.tabsPerRow: 8). Unfortunately with LessTif this setting is ignored at all. With OpenMotif it can be made working but a one line patch for NEdit is needed.
  
  
• In March 2014 I had to upgrade my system to Debian 8 (jessie/sid, not yet released) because the CAD-program I have (commercial product, developed on Ubuntu) is not supported on Debian 7 any more. Debian 8 reintroduces OpenMotif (which is now under LGPL v2.1) with version 2.3.4-5 and the old version from Debian 5 cannot be used anymore. (One could leave it installed but there other programs which want the new version.)
  
  
• As a consequence I dropped my NEdit version 2:5.5-2.x and switched over to Debians 1:5.6~cvs20081118-8. I added a few things I had on my previous version already and what I am used to for years. My private NEdit version is now 1:5.6~cvs20081118-8.2.
  
    * Patch source/preferences.c for language mode setting when a file is loaded:
      Now first use the file extension and then look in its contents. The former
      order prevented correct language detection due to ambigous recognition
      patterns.
     
    * Patch "ewmh-raise"
      URL: http://sourceforge.net/p/nedit/patches/172/
      Raise a (partially) hidden nedit window when opening a new file from
      nedit-nc.
  
    * Patch "move tab by drag and drop"
      URL: http://sourceforge.net/p/nedit/patches/170/
      This needs OpenMotif what happens to be met since it is (again) part of
      Debian.
  
    * Patch source/window.c to show multiple tab rows.
  
    * Add a small patch to Microline/XmL/Folder.c to make longer parts of
      filenames visible on tabs when many files are open. TODO: Still more
      characters could be shown.
     
    * Improve desktop integration (nedit.desktop) 
  
  
  

• The 3D visualization of tabs (a small bright horizontal line) is drawn at a wrong vertical location when more than one tab row is active. Nearly invisible.
  
  
• Using drag and drop with tabs on multiple rows is hard to use. Obviously this combination never has been tested. Drag and drop with one tab row is fine though.
  
  
• The Microline folder widget originally rotates the tab rows so the row with the active tab is always at the bottom. Others and I find this is irritating. So I simply switched this off by commenting out a few lines of code. Preferable this should be user configurable.
  
  
• The number of open files shown in the windows menu is limited by the vertical screen size. In cases with very many open files (and depending of the font size) there may not be enough room to show all entries. Is there is an option in Open Motif which lets menus expand horizontally (additional rows) when needed?
  

In order to return my findings to the community I release the files and packages I have created here. This is not an official release, of course, and no support can be supplied. Nevertheless I hope it may be helpful for all those coming here across.

Markus

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