XNEdit 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.
XNEdit is a fork of the Nirvana Editor (NEdit) and provides new functionality like antialiased text rendering and support for unicode.
Pre-built executables will be available for many operating system. Check out the XNEdit web page.
If you have downloaded a pre-built executable you can skip ahead to the section called INSTALLATION. Otherwise, the requirements to build XNEdit from the sources are:
- ANSI C99 compiler
- make utility (eg, GNU make)
- pkg-config
- X11 development stuff (headers, libraries)
- Xrender and Xft
- iconv (*BSD, cygwin)
- Fontconfig
- Motif 2.0 or above
Optionally one may use:
- yacc (or GNU bison)
You can install all necessary dependencies with the following command.
Debian/Ubuntu:
apt install gcc make pkgconf libmotif-dev
EL/Fedora:
dnf install gcc make pkgconf motif-devel
openSUSE:
zypper install gcc make pkg-config motif-devel
Arch:
pacman -S gcc make pkgconf openmotif
FreeBSD:
pkg install pkgconf open-motif libiconv
Solaris/OpenIndiana:
pkg install gcc make pkgconf motif
Cygwin:
setup-x86_64.exe -qP gcc-g++,make,git,pkg-config,libX11-devel,libXt-devel,libXm-devel,libXrender-devel,libXft-devel,libiconv-devel,libfontconfig-devel,motif,bison
To build XNEdit from source, run make from XNEdit's root directory and specify the build-configuration:
make <build-config>
Available configurations are:
- linux
- solaris
- freebsd
- netbsd
- openbsd
- macos
- cygwin
- generic
If everything works properly, this will produce two executables called 'xnedit' and 'xnc' in the directory called 'source'.
To install the XNEdit binaries and desktop integration files, run as root:
make install
This will install the binaries to /usr/bin and desktop integration files to
/usr/share. The desktop integration consists of a starter file xnedit.desktop
and the icon xnedit.png.
To install to another destination, specify a path prefix with
make install PREFIX=/path
To install just the binaries, copy the files xnedit and xnc from the
source directory to your path.
To run XNEdit, simply type xnedit, 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 xnedit command
line, look under the heading of "XNEdit Command Line".
The recommended way to use XNEdit, though, is in client/server mode, invoked by the xnc executable. It allows you to edit multiple files within the same instance of XNEdit (but still in multiple windows). This saves memory (only one process keeps running), and enables additional functionality (such as find & replace across multiple windows). See "Server Mode and xnc" in the help menu for more information.
XNEdit uses the same preferences format as NEdit 5.7. Also the X-Resources have
the same appname nedit. Therefore NEdit's settings are compatible with
XNEdit, except the font configuration.
XNEdit's default configuration directory is ~/.xnedit. To use your
existing NEdit settings in XNEdit, copy the content from ~/.nedit/ to
~/.xnedit or just rename the ~/.nedit directory.
After that, you need to adjust the font settings. To use the default XNEdit font settings, delete the following lines from the nedit.rc file:
nedit.textFont: ...
nedit.boldHighlightFont: ...
nedit.italicHighlightFont: ...
nedit.boldItalicHighlightFont: ...
Or alternatively, adjust the fonts directly in XNEdit.
More information is available from XNEdit's on-line help system, the man-pages and from the web page for XNEdit.
Bug reports and feature requests can be issued at github or sourceforge, or contact me via email.
- https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit/issues
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/xnedit/
- Olaf Wintermann olaf.wintermann@gmail.com
XNEdit is based on NEdit 5.7 and developed by Olaf Wintermann.
NEdit developers: Tony Balinski, Arne Førlie, Nathaniel Gray, Eddy De Greef, Thorsten Haude, Andrew Hood, Scott Tringali, TK Soh, Mark Edel, Joy Kyriakopulos, Christopher Conrad, Jim Clark, Arnulfo Zepeda-Navratil, Suresh Ravoor, Max Vohlken, Yunliang Yu, Donna Reid, Steve Haehn, Steve LoBasso and Alexander Mai.
Additional NEdit patches by: Fredrik Jönsson, Per Grahn.
XNEdit contributions: Laszlo Ersek, Mike Becker, Peter Mühlenpfordt and Valerio Messina.
The regular expression matching routines used in NEdit are adapted (with permission) from original code written by Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto.
The Microline widgets are inherited from the Mozilla project.
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, Seak Teng-Fong, Joor Loohuis, Mark Jones and Niek van den Berg.
XNEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License
See the LICENSE file for more informations.