LinuxFocus: NEdit, the universal editor of the Unix world

“NEdit is a very user-friendly graphical editor, ideal for
development. It is available for for more than 20 Unix systems.
This article is meant as an introduction to NEdit. It is not a in
depth review of the editor and it’s features.“

“Both the source code and pre-compiled binaries are
available.”

“Since not so long ago (December 1999) NEdit was not licensed
under the GPL. It is therefore still today not provided directly as
a part of Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD… distributions.”

“For this reason and due to competition from other editors, most
free Unix users have not had direct access and have missed the
opportunity to use NEdit. Since its creation at Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, NEdit has been distributed under the
Fermitools license. Additionally, NEdit uses the Motif library.
Until recently, there was no way to use NEdit without purchasing
Motif – a commercially available, graphical interface library.
Fortunately, with the wide availability of shareware/freeware on
the free operating systems available, Motif has a free equivalent:
Lesstif. Thanks to Lesstif, future versions of NEdit will fall
under the Gnu Public License, GPL! Now since NEdit comes with a GPL
licence it will probably be part of many free Operating Systems
distributions.”

“Currently, Lesstif is still under development slowly reaching
maturity. A few problems exist, particularly concerning the mouse
clicks, but it’s nothing serious. I will come back to this later
on.”

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