# NEdit

> Mediated Wiki article. Canonical URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/NEdit
> Markdown URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/NEdit.md
> Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEdit
> Source revision: 1310650626
> License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

**NEdit**, the Nirvana editor, is a [text editor](/source/Text_editor) and [source code editor](/source/Source_code_editor) for the [X Window System](/source/X_Window_System). It has an interface similar to text editors on [Microsoft Windows](/source/Microsoft_Windows) and [Macintosh](/source/Apple_Macintosh), rather than to older [UNIX](/source/Unix) editors like [Emacs](/source/Emacs). It was initially developed by Mark Edel for [Fermilab](/source/Fermilab) and released under a restrictive licence, but later relicenced under the [GPL-2.0-or-later](/source/GNU_General_Public_License) (plus Motif clause[2]) and became an independent [open-source](/source/Open-source_software) project maintained by a team of developers. Nedit was also distributed with the [IRIX](/source/IRIX) operating system.

NEdit is extensible through a C-like macro language, and it features automatic indentation and [syntax highlighting](/source/Syntax_highlighting) for a wide variety of [computer languages](/source/Computer_languages). NEdit can also process tags files generated using the Unix ctags command or the [Exuberant Ctags](/source/Ctags) program.

Its user interface is built using the [Motif](/source/Motif_(software)) toolkit, which made it an immediate success with a wide range of Unix platforms whose user interfaces use that toolkit. For a fully open source version, the alternative [LessTif](/source/LessTif) library could be used instead, but more recently the main Motif toolkit was made open source as well.

Major development on [SourceForge](/source/SourceForge) stopped in 2010,[3] with minor updates being made as recently as February 2017.[4] According to the project's [news page](https://sourceforge.net/p/nedit/news/) the source repository has been converted from [CVS](/source/Concurrent_Versions_System) to [Git](/source/Git_(software)) in September 2014.[5]

Version 5.6 was released in December 2014, after more than ten years since the release of the previous version, reflecting changes made during the time. This code is based on what was in the Debian NEdit package for some time.[6]

## XNEdit - Unicode support

From 2018, development continued on [GitHub](/source/GitHub) in the form of XNEdit, a fork of NEdit version 5.7. Version 1.4 offers full [Unicode](/source/Unicode) support, antialiased text rendering, modern Open/Save dialog and Drag&Drop of tabs.[7]

## See also

- [List of text editors](/source/List_of_text_editors)
- [Comparison of text editors](/source/Comparison_of_text_editors)
- [List of Unix commands](/source/List_of_Unix_commands)

## References

1. ["NEdit's history"](https://web.archive.org/web/20060926213825/http://nedit.gmxhome.de/history.html). Archived from [the original](http://nedit.gmxhome.de/history.html) on 2006-09-26.

1. ["Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation"](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs)

1. ["Project Statistics: NEdit"](https://web.archive.org/web/20140310211831/http://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit/stats/scm?repo=CVSRepository&dates=2010-01-01+to+2012-07-31). Archived from [the original](https://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit/stats/scm?repo=CVSRepository&dates=2010-01-01+to+2012-07-31) on 2014-03-10.

1. ["Project Statistics: NEdit"](https://web.archive.org/web/20140310202059/http://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit/stats/scm?repo=CVSRepository&dates=2012-10-01+to+2012-11-01). Archived from [the original](https://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit/stats/scm?repo=CVSRepository&dates=2012-10-01+to+2012-11-01) on 2014-03-10.

1. Git repository at [SourceForge](https://sourceforge.net/p/nedit/git/ci/master/tree/)

1. ["5.6 for real!"](https://sourceforge.net/p/nedit/news/2014/12/56-for-real/). NEdit / News. 2014. Retrieved 2015-03-11.

1. ["GitHub - unixwork/xnedit: A fast and classic X11 text editor, based on NEdit, with full unicode support and antialiased text rendering."](https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit). *[GitHub](/source/GitHub)*

## External links

- [Alternate Niki website](http://nedit.hackvalue.nl/niki/index.php/Main_Page) [Archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20101210151306/http://nedit.hackvalue.nl/niki/index.php/Main_Page) 2010-12-10 at the Wayback Machine
- [Users' mailing list](https://web.archive.org/web/20110727064757/http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.editors.nedit.user)
- [Developers' mailing list](https://web.archive.org/web/20110726121533/http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.editors.nedit.devel)
- [NEdit manual](https://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/editors/nedit/contrib/misc/nedit.pdf)

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article [NEdit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEdit) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEdit?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.