NEdit
is a standard GUI (Graphical User Interface) style text
editor for programs and plain-text files. Users of Macintosh
and MS Windows based text editors should find NEdit a
familiar and comfortable environment. NEdit provides all
of the standard menu, dialog, editing, and mouse support,
as well as all of the standard shortcuts to which the
users of modern GUI based environments are accustomed.
For users of older style Unix editors, welcome to the
world of mouse-based editing!
NEdit is freely distributed under the terms of the
Gnu General Public License.
Help sections of interest to new users
are listed under the "" heading in the top-level Help
menu:
Programmers should also read the introductory section
under the "Features for Programming" section:
Programming
with NEdit
If you get into trouble, the
command in the
menu can reverse any modifications that you make.
NEdit does not change the file you are editing until
you tell it to Save.
Start NEdit by typing nedit.
You can specify a file or several files to edit on
the command line, but you can also open them from
inside of NEdit. If you don't specify a file name
to edit, NEdit will open a window titled "Untitled".
You can create a new file by typing into this window
and choosing
or ...
from the
menu. There is no "main window" in NEdit,
all editor windows are equivalent, and NEdit remains
running as long as at least one window is open.
 Editing an Existing File
To open an existing file, choose
from the file menu. Select the file that you want
to open in the pop-up dialog that appears and click
on OK . You may open
any number of files at the same time. Each file will
appear in its own editor window. Using
rather than re-typing the NEdit command and running
additional copies of NEdit, will give you quick access
to all of the files you have open via the Windows
menu, and ensure that you don't accidentally open
the same file twice. NEdit has no "main"
window. It remains running as long as at least one
editor window is open.
Creating a New File
If you already have an empty (Untitled)
window displayed, just begin typing in the window.
To create a new Untitled window, choose
from the File menu. To give the file a name and save
its contents to the disk, choose
or
from the File menu.
Backup Files
NEdit maintains periodic backups of
the file you are editing so that you can recover the
file in the event of a problem such as a system crash,
network failure, or X server crash. These files are
saved under the name ~filename (on Unix) or _filename
(on VMS), where filename is the name of the file you
were editing. If an NEdit process is killed, some
of these backup files may remain in your directory.
(To remove one of these files on Unix, you may have
to prefix the ~ (tilde) character with a (backslash)
to prevent the shell from interpreting it as a special
character.)
Shortcuts
As you become more familiar with NEdit,
substitute the control and function keys shown on
the right side of the menus for pulling down menus
with the mouse.
Dialogs are also streamlined so you can enter information
quickly and without using the mouse. To move the keyboard
focus around a dialog, use the tab and arrow keys.
One of the buttons in a dialog is usually drawn with
a thick, indented, outline. This button can be activated
by pressing Return or Enter. The Cancel or Dismiss
button can be activated by pressing escape.
For example, to replace the string "thing"
with "things" type:
<ctrl-r>thing<tab>things<return>
To open a file named "whole_earth.c",
type:
<ctrl-o>who<return>
(how much of the filename you need to type depends
on the other files in the directory). See the section
called Keyboard
Shortcuts for more details.
Users who have set their keyboard focus
mode to "pointer" should set "Popups Under Pointer"
in the Default Settings menu to avoid the additional
step of moving the mouse into the dialog.
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Released on Wed, 6 Nov 2002
by
C. Denat