Features

1. Why NEdit does not support drag and drop?
2. Why don't you integrate Max Vohlken's / Yunliang Yu's versions into the official release of NEdit
3. Is it possible to use NEdit on windows 95 or NT?
4. Why aren't there pre-entered default values in text fields of dialogs?
5. I would like to use (multiple fonts, special symbols) in my file, but NEdit seems to allow just one single font.
6. Auto-wrap doesn't work well
7. NEdit scrolls too fast when I extend a selection by dragging the mouse outside of the window.
8. Is there a special symbol that represents the selected text, usable in shell commands?
9. How can I print highlighted text on my printer as it appears in NEdit.

NEdit no longer uses the Motif text widget, so all of the functionality had to be duplicated in the new widget. Drag and drop between windows got left off due to time pressure of getting out the new release, but it will be back some day.

Many of their changes will eventually find their way in to the "official" version, but some will not. Max has really done quite a lot of stuff. I appreciate it, and I think it's kind of neat to have a "bleeding edge" version of NEdit around to try out new features.

I can't just apply Max's patches to our version and release it. Some of them break the VMS version, some interfere with existing commands that are important to other users, and some are just customizations that I don't particularly agree with. Mostly, I want to do a lot of testing to make sure the changes are safe on all platforms, and I just don't have time right now. (Mark Edel)

Update as of NEdit version 5.2RC1: The forthcoming NEdit version 5.2 contains several functionalities of Max's patches.

There is an NT version of NEdit, available at http://nedit.org/download/win32.shtml. A mini-FAQ is also available.

X has a strict convention that there can be only one selection at a time on the whole display. This means that some of the tricks used in PC and Macintosh programs don't work in X. On PCs and Macs, programs can fill in default values in text fields, and select the text that they have inserted such that If the user types over the selection, it will automatically be erased. Under X, there is a price to pay for making an automatic selection. The selection must be "stolen" from some other window, maybe some other program. If the user's intent was to paste a selection that existed before the dialog popped up, once the automatic selection is made, they are out of luck.

If NEdit automatically transferred the selection to the Find or Replace dialog, it would either have to steal the selection, or users would have to click or drag the mouse over the text to delete it before they could type anything different. Instead, NEdit has a "Find Selection" command, as well as various methods of pasting and copying the selection into dialog fields. It also allows you to recall of previous search strings in the Find and Replace dialogs via the up-arrow and down-arrow keys.

NEdit is a plain text editor, not a word processor. Plain text files have no font or formatting information contained in them, they are just a string of ascii characters. While you might find a font with limited symbols and greek letters, your troubles would just be beginning. You'd still have trouble getting the printer to agree and print out the characters as they appeared in NEdit. For anything involving font changes or special symbols, you need a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, or a text formatting program like LaTEX.

You probably want continuous wrap mode (Preferences -> Wrap -> Continuous).

Because NEdit is not a word processor, it is stuck with the limits of the plain text format. In the default, auto-newline, wrapping mode, nedit does wrapping by inserting newline characters. Because there is only one newline character, NEdit can't distinguish a newline which can be "unwrapped" from one which the user intended to be permanent. While it might be possible for NEdit to temporarily make that distinction, for example while the cursor is on a particular line that the user is typing, ultimately, NEdit will have to forget this information, because there is no way to save it in the file. Users who work in auto-newline wrap mode tend to make liberal use of the Fill paragraph command.

In continuous wrapping mode, you can intentionally leave out the newlines within paragraphs, and lines will be wrapped as needed to fit within the page. When you edit in the middle of a paragraph, the text will be continuously adjusted. However, continuous wrap mode has it's limitations too. All paragraphs must be lined up against the right margin to take advantage of continuous wrapping, and Unix systems have limited support for files of that format. You may have trouble printing and viewing the files outside of NEdit.

NEdit features proportional auto-scrolling, where the speed is controlled by how far your mouse is beyond the edge of the window. If you want it to scroll slower, bring the mouse back closer to the text.

Below is an example from the NEdit discussion list (from David L. Paterline) of a "Find All" command implemented by using the selection as an argument to the grep command:

I set up a command to list all lines in a file which contain the highlighted selection as follows, using the Preferences -> Shell Commands menu:

        Menu Entry:           all <selection>
        Command Input:        selection
        Command Output:       new window
        Save file before:     yes
        Shell Command:        grep -n -- "`cat -`" %

The cat - portion of the command echoes the selected text to the grep -n command, which lists the lines containing the selection with line numbers. The output of the command appears in a new window; I can then highlight a line number in the new window and use the Search -> Goto Selected menu in the original window to jump to the line in the original file.

In the current version, that's not possible, but there are external tools for highlighting, which are specifically designed for printing, including a2ps, enscript, and genscript.