Leading A Low-Profile Free Software Project

NEdit is a Linux/Unix "point and click" text editor that gets almost no press but has a dedicated (if small) band of devoted users, including rusty at kuro5hin and myself. We get lots of news about high-profile Open Source and free software projects, but rarely hear about ones like NEdit or the people who lead them -- like Mark Edel, NEdit's original author, who is still the project's integration "gatekeeper." This is a good opportunity for anyone who is thinking about starting a free software project to ask what it's like to toil in the shadow of giants. Please post your questions below. We'll forward about 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Mark tomorrow, and will post his answers next week.

Comments

Would you still choose Motif?

[Tet]

At the time NEdit was started, there was no real alternative, but if you were starting again today, would you still choose to use Motif?

Re:Would you still choose Motif?

[Tet]

i don't care if it's written using motif or gtk or qt or whatever as long as it is fast and small and it does all I expect it to do. and nedit does it.

From my personal point of view, it *doesn't* do that. Although it is reasonably fast, it's significantly slower than, say, vim, particularly when editing large files. It also doesn't allow editing of binary files. Don't get me wrong, it's a great program -- it's just not for me. And while I agree that the choice of toolkit doesn't affect the end user, it does potentially mean you have a smaller pool of developers that could enhance the program.

Project coordination

[techmuse]

First, thanks for producing Nedit. I've been a big fan of the program for years, and it's always one of the first things that I install. I'm wondering how you go about coordinating the development and testing of code on an open source project. Do you create well defined APIs for modules to interact with, and then ask people to work on modules that use those APIs? Do you put one person in charge of each segment of the project? How do you resolve disagreements over the features and functionality of the project? PS. What happened to the // or /* */ commenting macro in Nedit? I miss it!

Re:Project coordination

[irix]

First, thanks for producing Nedit. I've been a big fan of the program for years, and it's always one of the first things that I install

Amen. I have used nedit for over 5 years - SGI has shipped it with their systems for quite a while.

As soon as I switched to a new job coding on Solaris the first thing I installed was nedit. As soon as I got into Linux a few years back, the forst thing I installed was nedit.

If you are reading this - thanks very much for producing nedit - I love it.

Using Motif/other 'unpopular' libs

[JanneM]

A lot of people are very hesitant to install a whole set of libraries to run only one application -- almost no matter how good the app is -- when there are 'good enough' alternatives for the standard libs they already have.

Do you feel that NEdit has suffered from not using more popular libraries, and does it matter to you?

Re:Using Motif/other 'unpopular' libs

[brucet]

Don't forget that virtually every Unix with the exception of Linux comes with Motif but does *not* come with gtk, qt, etc.

I work with Solaris boxes a lot and have you ever seen the expression on an system administrator's face when you ask them to install gtk? (it ain't pretty and the install doesn't happen). Plus if you're not running on x86, you can pretty much forget about having all your gtk apps precompiled for your particular version of your OS, so warm up your compiler.

-Bruce

Re:Using Motif/other 'unpopular' libs

[Devil's Avocado]

You don't need to install anything except NEdit to use NEdit. It's a statically linked binary on any system (like Linux) that doesn't come with Motif preinstalled. Heck, you don't even really have to 'install' nedit, just download the binary and run it from wherever it lands. This is really nice when you don't have root on a system.

Technical question

[11223]

I saw some screenshots on your site that show the KDE window manager, but nedit's look is that of CDE. How did you convice Motif to look like it does on a CDE environment without CDE being present?

Re:Technical question

[karzan]

Motif is highly customisable by resources (unlike some other toolkits). All you have to do is set the right X resources the same way CDE does--it's built into Motif.

Re:Technical question

[11223]

Wow, thanks. I have to use several Motif apps in places where CDE is not available, and I like the CDE/Motif look better than standard Motif. Would you happen to know what resources those are?

Re:Technical question

[karzan]

That's just flat out not true. You're obviously very ignorant of what Motif can do. Motif is extremely flexible and can dynamically be made to look practically any way you want it to. All you have to do is set the right X resources the right way.

Re:Technical question

[11223]

So, what is the right way to set the X resources to get the "flat" CDE look as opposed to the "3D" normal Motif look? Can you give me an Xresources file?

Re:Technical question

[Sax Maniac]

CDE sets a number of resources on the XmDisplay object. In 2.0, this tells most of the Motif widgets to change their appearance. Some of these are:

XmNenableThinThickness: use smaller shadows to make the 3-D effects "flatter"
XmNenableEtchedInMenu: reverse menu shadow effects
XmNenableToggleVisual: use 'checkboxes' for toggles instead of reversing shadows.

To get the complete list, you need to have a 2.0 Motif manual. Unfortunately, most info out there is only for 1.2 as that's what is most prevalent.

Motif 2.x documentation is sometimes difficult to find in print, but there are some good sources online. Read the docs. Motif is impossible to use without full, accurate docs on all the resource settings.

You can put this in your .Xdefaults file to make all Motif 2.x apps look similar to CDE:

*enableBtn1Transfer: true
*enableButtonTab: true
*enableDefaultButton: true
*defaultButtonEmphasis: XmINTERNAL_HIGHLIGHT
*enableDragIcon: true
*enableEtchedInMenu: true
*enableMenuInCascade: true
*enableMultiKeyBindings: true
*enableThinThickness: true
*enableToggleColor: true
*enableToggleVisual: true

Re:Technical question

[Sax Maniac]

All I said is that it is Motif that defines the look of an app, not the desktop environment.

Wrong. While Motif does define the look of an app, the desktop environment can make global changes to impose a look on all Motif apps.

CDE (and KDE) both do this.

Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[omarius]

I run a small (one developer: me!) project at sourceforge: a text-based web bulletin board called vaxbb.

Although sourceforge says it's been downloaded 63 times, I've received nary a comment or email of any sort. Granted, it needs a lot of work before vaxbb will be an install-n-go program, but I definitely think it fills a niche (I started writing it because I couldn't find a free bb that I liked the look of).

So, after all that intro, my question is: Does a project have to be super-slick before people will use or contribute to it? How does one find developers w/out a huge user base. . .or get a user base without having a fully-developed program?

-Omar

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[bigbird]

I've written a LGPL'd Java FTP library. It's been downloaded maybe 1000-2000 times, but I've received no more than about 10 emails. My impression is that you receive an email every 100-500 downloads.

This is quite possibly good news - people have downloaded and used the library, and have no problems with it. There's not really a need to contact the author unless you want an enhancement of some sort.

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[Carpathius]

Number of users is proportional to two things:

How easy it is to find your software, and how many people want that kind of software.

I've averaged pretty close to one email per one hundred downloads of my software, so the above figures seem right to me.

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[DrCode]

I have similar experience, having worked on the Exult project about three years. Here are some comments and suggestions:

1. Yours is a specialized utility, so advertise it in places where bb users are likely to browse. For example, I usually post Exult release notices on the Ultima newsgroups. Also, put it on freshmeat.net; that gets a lot more hits from casual users.
2. Most people won't bother trying your program until it's fairly far along. I received very little feedback the first year.
3. Most emails will be from users with bugs or suggestions. If your utility is small, focused, and works right, you won't get as much email.
4. It takes even longer before others will contribute. In my case, a couple people helped a little during the second year; but it was only during the third year, when the code base had grown quite large, that I started getting major help.
5. (I hate to admit this...) Exult didn't start getting a lot of users until one of the contributors ported it to Win32, after I had replaced the X code with SDL.

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to be 'super-slick', but you do need to make sure people can understand it. My own project was going along rather quietly with little outside interest for quite awhile. Then I sat down and documented all the module interfaces, protocols, and structure member details. After that point, attention slowly built up around it.

My guess is that some people will use it just because it scratches their itch, but to really get other people sending patches and the like, they have to know how it works. Some die hards will jump right in and attack the source, but others will wait for the documention. Besides, documenting all of it shows that there is someone behind the project who knows HOW to do such a thing, and cares enough to see it done. That's usually a little more encouraging for long-term results, as opposed to your typical "lookit me! i have a web page, code to follow soon!" startup.

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[stephend]

As others have said, 63 isn't actually that many.

However, there are other reasons why you might not have heard from anyone. I'm the author of the Oracle on Linux Installation HOWTO (mirrored all over the net as part of the LDP) and I've noticed that immediately after a new issue the amount of mail I get drops. The reason, I guess, is that it solves more peoples problems. It does the job so people feel no need to comment.

But, as you've found, it's still nice to get a "thank you" or a really good question that's not already answered.

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[jonabbey]

I wish I knew the answer to this one. I have been working on an open source directory management project for the last 5 years, and I worked on a freely downloadable prototype for a couple of years before that. In all that time, the ratio of downloads to email sent has been on the order of 100 downloads per each email, leaving me without any idea how many people are actually using what I've been working on. Even when it was very difficult to do with the prototype, I found out years later that people had adopted it but never sent email to me about it.

I think (hope) that if a project is well done and widely useful, that once it reaches a point of stability and documentation such that people can use it without a great deal of initial investment of effort that the ranks of downloaders will swell and that 1 person in 100 will grow to be significant enough that a few good developers latch on to the idea and come forward with enhancements to the already working system.

In my project, I'm going through quite a lot of effort to make it feasible for others to customize the system for different environments, and I'm going through a lot of effort to try to document everything adequately, but the 1 in 100 factor still seems to hold pretty strongly.

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[SomeOne2]

Thats true. I observed Exult nearly from start (when it was only a viewer, before you added the fsm dialogs etc.) and check regulary but only mailed you once when it refused to run under NT. Personally I was interested in the project but had no time to contribute so I did not mail...

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[stevey]

I've hit against this problem so many times .. from the other direction.

If I'm using a program that has a missing feature I really want .. I'll spend a while knocking it up, and submit it to the author.

95% of the time the developer will ignore my mail, and not even respond.

(Of course there are exceptions, like FreeAmp gave me write access to the repository on the strength of one context diff ;)

Even more depressing, though, is the number of times I've sent people diffs/patches to allow their Linux based apps to compile/run on Windows - these are almost always ignored.

Seems to me like lots of developers don't care about feedback. I'm always ecstatic to receive feedback on any of my code .. good or bad, and I've applied several patches random people mailed me ..

Steve
---

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[cjwatson]

I can believe the Linux/Windows thing. If a developer only runs Linux, then, sure, it's nice to have the program run on Windows too - I'd hope that my current Perl project could run happily enough on Windows, given a little tweaking - but it means that the developer is then at least half-expected to support it. Perhaps it would be worth saying that you'll be willing to continue supporting the program under Windows for future releases.

Sometimes the time delay can be surprising. I pinged the trn4 developer for a while, and then after several months he moved everything onto sourceforge and gave me write access. :) It's depressingly easy for the busier of developers to get behind on their mail.

But yes, feedback is fantastic, and I do try to spend some time responding to it whenever I can.

Re:Users. Developers. And How to Find Them.

[edsonmedina]

annouce you utility at freshmeat.net :)

i have about 20/30 downloads a day, but when i annouce it at freshmeat i get 200 a day!

i have had a total of about 1100 downloads in one and a half months, and i already have 5 voluntary developers, lots of contributions and i received like 100 emails related to the software

i aint no hero, and my software is not that special, just try it

by the way, check it at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/promanager

Just make it library neutral

[sips]

Make it use only the features found in the standard c++ standard then just code the rest into the app. Makes it easier to have people run the stuff. I have not used programs before because of just this reason.

vi

[Anonymous Coward]

Must make the obligatory, and wholey unnessisary satement
vi is the best editor in the world!
Nedit is for windows programmers who don't want to leave their point and click world.

</needless rant>

Other than that though, Nedit is pretty good.

Re:vi

[delysid-x]

vi and emacs are the first things i nuke after i install... then i throw on pico or nano.

Re:vi

[The Troll Catcher]

Correction - gvim is the best. The power (and speed/ease of use) of VI with the convenience and good looks of a GUI editor :).

Re:vi

[MSjogren]

Amen brother :-)

Re:vi

[john.wingfield]

No, NEdit is for programmers who need a decent syntax-highlighting editor and like the benefits of window-based applications.

Re:vi

[Savant]

Vim highlights syntax quite nicely thank you. And what are 'the benefits of windows-based applications'? Using the mouse is really bad for touch-typists, and any editor that reduces mouse usage is therefore a Good Thing and a productivity tool for them.

That said, I use Nedit, and like it. But when my touch-typing becomes halfway decent, I shall use it no more.

Savant

Getting People on board.

[ColonelNorth]

What does it take to get more developers on in on this sort of project. I'm sure there are many people who'd be interested in working on a good project internationally. How does one track them down and get them involved?

If it can handle emacs key bindings i'm interested

[Anonymous Coward]

In today's world, an editor needs to be able to emulate at least some of the interfaces that folks already know - this is called leveraging the user's knowledge.

In addition, an interface should be designed to be friendly to RSI sufferers. This usually means providing a way of avoiding the mouse, because switching between mouse and keyboard tends to stress the hand. The idea is: provide a point & click interface for beginners, and a keyboard interface for experienced users.

This all leads up to an editor that allows switchable keyboard interfaces so that the large nuber of folks with expertise in emacs, vi, msword, etc can leverage their experience.

Lee Campbell
Always in Error, never in doubt!

Portability or Java?

[Coz]

I used Nedit once, years ago and I'm glad to see it's still around. I see from your pages it's still X-focused, Motif-based, although it's been ported to Windoze and the Mac.

My question: has there been consideration of rebaselining it into a truly "portable" language or library set, such as Java with Swing or one of the other "lightweight" open-source multiOS frameworks, or will it stay X-focused for the forseeable future?

Re:Portability or Java?

[jacoplane]

You mean like JEdit
(http://jedit.sourceforge.net)

Re:Portability or Java?

[kurioszyn]

It has not been ported to Windows. It runs when you have X server running which basically precludes 99% of Windows users.

Re:Portability or Java?

[Devil's Avocado]

JEdit is pretty nice. I considered switching from NEdit because of some of the sweeter features that JEdit offers. Unfortunately JEdit is hobbled by the Java curse -- it hemmhorages memory. I like a full-featured editor. I don't like giving it 20 megs of RAM. I should be able to edit more than one file on a 64 MB machine. In the end I went back to NEdit. It's small, quick, fully customizable, and effective.

The obvious

[Mr. Piccolo]

Why should I choose Nedit over gedit, XEmacs, emacs, vi, or ed?

NEdit is nice, but....

[Azerphale]

Are there any plans to port it to Windows or Mac OS? Or perhaps a more exotic port: Palm OS?

Re:NEdit is nice, but....

[joshv]

There is a port of Nedit to cygwin. Runs great with Exceed (win32 X Server) under windows.

Granted, this is not the easiest way to run it, and for my money ultraedit is all a win32 user could ever want or need in a text editor.

Wish the ulraedit guy would work on a Linux/Unix port.

-josh

When do you plan to dump Motif?

[renoX]

I'm a huge fan of NEdit, to summarize my POV: it's my favourite editor.

It has only one downside: you have to keep you NumLock off to use the shortcuts (a "feature" caused by Motif..).
This means that I have to remap the NumPad on each computer I use!
This is not a big problem but it is annoying, and NEdit is the only app which is still using Motif on my PC (I don't use Netscape at home).

I have considered doing the port of NEdit to Gtk+, but as I don't know Motif, it would be quite difficult..

Re:When do you plan to dump Motif?

[LizardKing]

I have considered doing the port of NEdit to Gtk+, but as I don't know Motif, it would be quite difficult.

The topic of porting to GTK+ comes up regularily on the NEdit mailing list - a bit like the C++ threads on the Linux Kernel mailing list. NEdit uses the Xt convenience functions a hell of a lot, so porting it to GTK+ wouldn't be much fun. Porting to Qt using TrollTechs QXt extension would probably be easier.

Chris

Re:When do you plan to dump Motif?

[karzan]

I hate to see people bash Motif like this. You can customise all this stuff using X resources if you don't like the way Motif handles numlock. (incidentally I've never noticed this...you sure you're not using some weird old version of Motif, or maybe Lesstif?)

I use NEdit all the time, and one of the things I like best about it is it is based on Motif. Rather than all the shitty "glitzy" toolkits like Gtk and Qt that take hours to load over the network and are not worth it anyway, NEdit uses the best toolkit around. Motif is still better than all the alternatives--it's faster, more efficient, more to-the-point, and more powerful. This is one of my main reasons for using NEdit in the first place.

Re:When do you plan to dump Motif?

[Sax Maniac]

This is probably the single most FAQ on the support list. Someone has recently submitted a patch to fix this problem.

Re:When do you plan to dump Motif?

[jcupitt65]

This isn't my experience: I've just moved my app (a spreadsheety thing) from Motif to gtk, and seen about a factor of 10 speed up. Plus the API is much, much nicer to work with.

(GUI toolkit speed is hard to quantify ... the factor of 10 is the time taken to load a large workspace and create all the widgets to display it)

I have to ask...

[pb]

What data structure do you use to store the text internally, and why? What trade-offs exist in your approach?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:I have to ask...

[Cuthalion]

Look, there are (as we learned yesterday) 148 open source text editors. Look at the bloody source!

Re:I have to ask...

[pb]

First, I'm more interested in their opinion on it than I am on my opinion on it.

Second, no thanks, I already looked at the source for nano today, and it's ugly. (some kind of filestructure / linked list is used to store the data; I gather there could be some problems with files with many lines, both in seeking and in memory usage, but I'm not sure yet...)

Third, it was yesterday's conversation that prompted my question in the first place. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I think that it has to kind have a future

[sips]

One of the problems is that people will not contribute to a project if they don't have any way to see it being used or see that it has a good code base. This goes for any project that you want to have people work on. This is purely psychological but is deeply engrained in how people think.

PS. It would also help if you uploaded at least a temp page for sourceforge. I just like to be able to get some page and maybe some info before downloading things to see what the project is like.

Does your bulletin board support nested comment display ala slashdot? If it does avoid nested tables like the plague because it's not considered good coding form by the lynx developers and the like and excludes many people who want to undetstand the flow of conversation that is going on.

How do you "advertise"?

[OlympicSponsor]

Reading newsgroups and mailing lists, I occasionally come across people who have problems that could be solved with software I have written and made available. I have a hard time coming up with a way to point them towards my software without coming across as some kind of big-headed, know-it-all, "my software cleans your floor and does your taxes" loser. What to do?
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.

Kudos

[PDHoss]

Offtopic, I guess, because it's not a question, but I'll risk it...

For me, Nedit was an important transistional program between the Windows world and the Linux camp. It did some things I expected a text-editor to do, and was not as daunting as vi. I was able to accomplish work with Nedit, and knowing that one tool made me a little bolder in exploring other tools that are second nature to the *nix gurus but cryptic to the newbies.

So, no question, but just a thank you.

PDHoss
======================================

63 is nothing

[OlympicSponsor]

My tiny utility has had nearly 1000 downloads. And what have I gotten in my inbox? One patch, maybe two bug reports and possibly as many as 5 "thanks". I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that a very very small percentage of the people who download, use. And a very very small percentage of the people who use, contribute.
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.

Welcome to the BigTime (tm)!

[efuseekay]

Now that NEdit is /.-ed :

WELCOME TO THE BIGTIME!

The Funny Thing About This Is....

[pyxl]

I did research for myself about 4 months back to find the most useful X-based text editor I could find - good features sets (syntax highlighting for the various bits 'o code I write was a big one - had to support PHP, Perl, HTML and shell at the least) but at the same time let me keep using the windows-type key bindings for navigation and text manipulation (shift and control with the arrow keys, Home and End...you know, basic stuff), and I eventually decided on Nedit.

Though it's got a few (very small) rough edges, and I'd like to see some features in it more like the windows editor Ultra Edit...it's still great. Though I'm sure that vi(m) and (x)emacs are just fabulous, I've managed to get my windows-type text navigation keybindings hardwired into my brain, and trying to change that makes me break out in hives and want to kick the cat. :)

I'd have to say that the "high profile" projects spoken of in this article are high profile only because of press coverage, and that because of the press' need to find a few "major themes" and sell advertising space around them. The reality (and beauty) of the open source community (I'm not using this word in a Katz-Petreley sense, I'm using it in a smile-and-nod-at-the-bumper-sticker sense) is that people who want to make cool stuff happen do it because they want to, because it's fun, because nifty people are impressed by it, and because they want to be a part of creating something free, diverse and very long lasting.

I'm looking forward to writing free software and documentation - my major problem is figuring out exactly what project to work on. I'm looking forward to that first email or message board post (and all the others after it) from a knowlegeable person telling me where I've screwed up and where I can get better - because I want to learn and make it (whatever "it" eventually is) better.

Every little bit of work that every person out there does toward making a better, freer world does indeed count. It means something. I know that it does, because if someone can read a HOWTO and understand it all perfectly the first time around because I either wrote it well or did good copyediting on it, they've saved time, and they're now that much closer to being a part of that overall freedom. Just because information about my efforts is not squished between advertisements in a magazine somewhere doesn't take away from that at all.

Degree of control required

[empty]

How much control do you exercise over NEdit?

With this question, I would like insight into the kind of benevolent dictator you are (if you do indeed follow the Linux method of development) in terms of personality and "managing" your developers (like a project manager). I would also like to know how much direction you give to the project at this point (actively deciding to pursue new features for NEdit, rather than just building on ideas that others bring up).

Can you still get laid by geekgirls

[Hairy_Potter]

If you use Nedit instead of vi?

I can't you how many times I've impressed a geekchick with my deft use of vi (yanking and putting are sufficiently obscure to the average geekchick to work), resulting in us leaving the computer lab together for a night of carnal bliss.

Would this be happening if I used Nedit, or would they think me some kind of Linux-come-lately poser?

Any geekgirls who want to kick in can answer this too.

And to any of the geekgirls that might recognize me behind my nom-de-plume, hey, we sure had fun, drop me a line, maybe I can see how many times I can make your kernel panic in a night!

suggestions from an open source author....

[josepha48]

Tk NotePad was something I wrote. I got a lot of suggestions and even some patches and fixes.

Suggestions for new developers:

First post your software on the web. If you don't have a place of your own ther eis always sourceforge.net.
Next make sure the name is descriptive of what it is. Sure a cool name is great, but it should also describe the software. I used Tk NotePad cause it is basically like windows notepad except in Tcl/Tk so it runs on Mac, *NIX, and Windows. Thus the name.
Post a link to it at freshmeat.net. According to them I have had somewhere in the over 1000 downloads range.
Make sure that if it has a GUI the GUI is intuitive. Not just to you, but to others as well. Ask friends to try it out. Since i modeled mine after windows notepad the GUI framework was already there. I also added a few necessary features to it.
Next make sure people understand what type of license you have it licensed under. GPL, MPL, LGPL, or in my case, "It's on your machine you do as you wish. If you fix a bug please sent it to me".
Make sure it solves a problem. At the time that I started my editor and released it to the net, kde was not at 1.0 and lesstif did not easily compile nedit. (AFAIK) Thus the choice of editors was emacs and vi.
lastly you cannot 'attract' developers. They will come only if they are interested in the project. Lets face it some projects are just not as interesting as others. Luckily for me there were other people out there that realized that at that time there were not real simple and easy to use text editors, and even though I did not get other developers to work on my project, I did get bug fixes, suggestions with & without patches and the shere enjoyment of learning Tcl/Tk (which made learning perl/C/C++ and Java easier).

This was my experience so I thought I'd share. (okay this is a shameless self plug) In case you are interested in a simple text editor check out http://www.mindspring.com /~j oeja/programs.html#Tcl-Tk

I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!

The Benefits of Opensource in a small project

[sterno]

One of the big things that is said about the beauty of open source is that it allows for a lot of people to see the code and weed out the bugs. So, on a smaller project such as this, how has the level of interaction with users and development been? Do you find you get lots of useful feedback and bug fixes or is it mostly you at the helm just trying to make a good piece of software?

---

Simply put, why?

[dmorin]

A recently posted Slashdot article (I believe the original is at linux.com) railed against one of the failings of OSS, citing text editors in particular, arguing that people don't want to contribute to other projects, they always want to run their own. What originally possessed you to create your own editor, rather than extend another project (call it editor X)? And, if someone today feels the same way about NEdit that you did about editor X at the time, would you recommend that they create their own editor too?

Re:Simply put, why?

[Matts]

I think you'll find that Nedit was there before most of them. Maybe all of them with the exception of vi and ed! (exhagerating I know, but this is an old project, not some new upstart editor).

So what possessed him to write an X based editor? There were none freely available at the time. Simple. Editor X didn't exist.

Don't forget Usenet

[AxelBoldt]

Prospective developers tend to hang out on usenet. Figure out what newsgroup is the right one, and post announcements of new versions of your program there. You'll get more feedback that way.

--

Common sense of FS/OSS development

[dilger]

Here's two questions:

1. From which (if any) of the commonly accepted principles of FS/OSS development does your project deviate?
2. How much time do you spend writing code vs doing more administrative/moderation tasks?

thanks. cbd.

Software Enginnering for OSS?

[Midnight Warrior]

Now that you've successfully created a wonderful, stable editor, how many of the following software engineering techniques were used on the project, or would have been helpful?

1. Clear, concise statement of work (since NEdit was developed with U.S. Govt funding)
2. A Requirements Management process (measurable details about end-user goals)
3. Requirements Traceability Matrix (did all the planned stuff get implimented?)
4. Design Documents (GUIs plus interactions with black-box libraries or external packages)
5. Work Breakdown/Size Estimates (what are the pieces of the design that need attacked, what skills are required for each, who is attacking each piece)
6. Project Tracking (some automated way of allowing outsiders to see how it's going)

Colleges are teaching this. Companies who want government contracts are starting to do this kind of stuff. Would these software engineering techniques help OpenSource biggies stay on track and on time even though there is no financial interest to do so? The upcoming <cough>Linuxkernel<cough> comes to mind.

Truely Portable Open Source Tool Kit?

[stonewolf]

I have been looking for a GUI tool kit to use for open source development. To support my application it must have a 3D widget (something that supports OpenGL or equivalent.) To make it possible to reach a large audience it must be portable to UNIX and Win32 (hiss boo but still 95% of the users.) Support for Mac and other niche OSes would be nice.

Does anyone know of a good one? So far I've identified the following:

Java -- has everything I want, but can require nasty complicated down loads and installation to get a version that has all the features I want to use.

tcl/tk -- Ok, I just don't like tcl, but it meets the spec.

QT -- almost perfect except that the GPLed version doesn't support Win32. Win32 support costs ~US $1500.

Any other suggestions?

Re:Truely Portable Open Source Tool Kit?

[lpontiac]

A few I've seen (but never used myself, mind you) are wxWindows, V and FLTK.

Re:Truely Portable Open Source Tool Kit?

[stonewolf]

Ok, I've looked at everything that has been suggested. My evaluations are as follows:

FLTK -- Very nice, free, supports windows and unix, supports OpenGL. Sadly, it appears to lack some of the standard dialogs that you really want in a toolkit. I may use this anyway because it is a very nice package. This is one I could get behind using just so that if I came up with useful widgets based on it I could contribute them.

V -- Seems to have everything I want. I'm not fond of the toolkit being layered on top of other tool kits, but this will work for what I want.

wxWindows -- No built in OpenGL support. GL support is available but not as a supported part of the package. Win32 support of OpenGL may or may not exist

GTK+ -- Win32 support is still not what you'd call complete. OpenGL support is from a third party. May or may not exist for win32.

OpenStep -- Can't find anything about this. OpenStep.org says the site will open in June of 1997? Seems to be vaporware. Did find a link on the Apple.com site that list it as being available for windows 95 at a price of $5000?

GNUStep -- Only supports UNIX. Says you might be able to run it under Window NT using cygwin.

So far it looks like FLTK and V are the closest to what I want. Looks like fltk (www.fltk.org GTK+ --

Re:Truely Portable Open Source Tool Kit?

[musicmaster]

What about: - SDL (http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/) - PLIB (http://plib.sourceforge.net/) for games - mesa (http://www.mesa3d.org/) for openGL And if you are going really 3D you can try CAD/GIS libraries like opencascade (http://www.opencascade.org/)

FYI: NEdit at SourceForge

[Sax Maniac]

Since nedit.org is slashdotted, FYI:

NEdit has recently been added as a SourceForge project. This was possible because the license recently changed to the GPL from a more restrictive one.

You can get the source there if the main distro site is overloaded. Stop by and see why NEdit rocks. (Hint: it's much faster than that Other Editor.)

The cross-platform issue

[Midnight Warrior]

One of the big moments for mature software projects is the issue of keeping the software cross-platform. Can you tell us a story about your struggles with keeping NEdit cross-platform? As a starter question: Is there a lessons-learned document around that gives good tips to avoid cross-platform issues, or have you ever though about making one?

How much design, how much evolution?

[Analog]

I find that NEdit has a near magical combination of ease of use and power. Using it for web development, I've set it up to syntax highlight the appropriate scripting language/html combinations, update my cvs repository, stage the site to a staging area on my local server and load the page into Netscape to verify everything's okay, then upload it to a remote webserver. And it's all attached to a hotkey combination; I can do all this without leaving the editor. Outstanding. Yet my wife can use the exact same setup and never know it does anything more than Notepad; all this doesn't get in her way in the slightest.

How did you achieve this balance? What design decisions were made in the beginning that facilitated this, and how have changes been made during NEdit's evolution such that this balance hasn't been disturbed?

Choose an editor because you like it?

[mattbee]

At the end of the day, most mature text editors have the same core functionality, but some make it easier to use than others. I chose NEdit because emacs is too complicated for my liking (and for anyone else who thinks you should be able to pick up an editor in half an hour), and if I wanted to change its behaviour on any small point I had to delve into the voluminous documentation. I'd previously used Zap, and Nedit is certainly the closest to this editor that I'd found. Its interface shows off all its features without the user needing any documentation, and there's a large `cookbook' type library of macros and syntax hilighting available which you can just plug in.

I'm not doubting the capability of emacs or vi, but I came to Linux from RISC OS, an OS where user interface design was very important, and so I don't believe you should have to spend any time at all learning how to use an editor. So when X isn't an option I use joe or pico-- I think you'd be surprised how many other `serious' programmers just can't be arsed to mess around with customising their editors when there's real code to hack.

Re:Choose an editor because you like it?

[Soruk]

I'm another RiscOS-to-Linux user and in the RiscOS world, like the previous poster says, UI design is very important. As a result, most apps are dead easy to pick up.

I've never used Zap, but I've used Pico almost as long as I knew it existed (and indeed, I'm wondering if someone has ported it to RiscOS :-) I ran into Nedit while on a work placement with a semiconductor firm in southern England and now use that for most editing tasks in Linux if I've got X running.

Indeed, the forthcoming Eridani Linux 6.3 release will include Nedit as standard :-)

Re:Choose an editor because you like it?

[Tet]

I came to Linux from RISC OS, an OS where user interface design was very important, and so I don't believe you should have to spend any time at all learning how to use an editor [...] I think you'd be surprised how many other `serious' programmers just can't be arsed to mess around with customising their editors when there's real code to hack.

You're right, I would be. Given that text editing is what a serious programmer does all day, every day, it's the one thing that really *has* to be right, and if that means taking some time to get it working the way you want, then so be it. You talk about UI design being important, but this is one area that nedit is lacking and vi really has right. The UI should make the common tasks as efficient as possible -- the ease with which it can be learned is very much a secondary consideration here. I've yet to meet anything that lets the user edit text as efficiently as vi.

Foreign language

[Punto]

Do you have any experience with programs written in a foreign language? I wrote this "free webmail" system in perl, and I want to open source it, but most of the code is in spanish (I mean the variable names, comments, etc), and I can't find a proper place to post the code. There are users, but it's difficult to find developers.

Do you have any experience with this? is it difficult for english speaking developers to read code on a different language?

--

Re:Foreign language

[ReverendGraves]

I can answer that: Yes. My team is currently engaged in deciphering the "Singapore Code," a code base for our company that was written by the French for a Singapore-based project. Try translating from the french when you've no background in the language... *shudder*

However, an uber-coder can read code, regardless of the mother tongue. We're lucky to have one of those on staff, and I'm not so arrogant to say it's me.

Re:Not a question.

[chegosaurus]

better than CygnusEd? I got to get me one of these! Now if only I could run it on a better OS than Workbench...

Re:I am always confused...

[iggie]

Let me guess, you're writing this from a green-on-black text terminal, aren't you? And under the hood, I'll bet you've got that other vestige of '70s computer technology: The Intel 8086 series. How many floppy drives do you have within easy reach? I'll bet also that all the code you write is all cramped together with nary a whitespace for lack of maneuverability. Some call it compact, I call it ugly. The only thing missing from NEdit is a popup menu to jump to function declarations. I use gTags for this, but its not as seamless as implemented in BBEdit.

License

[angst_ridden_hipster]

First, I want to say that I've been using Nedit for probably seven years, and I've always thought it was the best thing out there. Someone mentioned that it eased the transition from PC/Mac to Unix, and that was certainly true for me. So thanks for your great work!

When I first used Nedit, I was working for a government-related agency, which had restrictions on what kinds of software could be run. Because Mark Edel hosted the source on a Fermi Labs machine, I was able to weasel around some of those restrictions. This, of course, was not before GNU but was well before the Open Source movement gained its groundswell of popularity. When the movement did gain popular momentum, it was looked upon with distrust and suspicion within the agency where I worked. There were offhand references to Communism and anarchy whenever people heard my enthusiasm. Likewise, when I wanted to give out source to some utilities I wrote, I was summarily shot down and chastised -- "this was paid for by the Government!" I was told (which was exactly my point; they just had a different conclusion as to what that meant).

So... how did you convince Fermi Labs (or the DOE) to allow source distribution in the first place? Did you run into any difficulties when you decided to change the license? Did you have to get permission within the organization? If so, what did you need to do to get approval?

Thanks again!
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!

Re:License

[ArthurDent]

> Likewise, when I wanted to give out source to
> some utilities I wrote, I was summarily shot
> down and chastised -- "this was paid for by the
> Government!" I was told (which was exactly my
> point; they just had a different conclusion as
> to what that meant).

At the company where I work, we were able to gain access to code written by a government agency through the Freedom of Information Act. Unless there is something special about that block of code, then I would assume that nearly all government sponsored code is or could be made to be open source!

Ben

Re:License

[angst_ridden_hipster]

In the particular agency in question, I suspect that you'd have a hard time getting anything via FOIA. Although, admittedly, they're a lot less restrictive today, and they do release some code to the community.

For a fascinating view of how the FOIA can be subverted (if you're not willing to spend millions of dollars), check out the book "Gimme Some Truth: the John Lennon FBI Files" by John Wiener (or check out the web support site at http://www.lennonfbifiles.com/).

A lot of code gets classified, not because it has anything secret in it, but because they don't want to share it (also, the more classified documents you generate, the less likely you are to get fired, but that's another story). Also, a lot of fairly mundane code gets classified because it could lead you to ideas that might suggest to you something that *is* classified.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!

why license change?

[Anonymous Coward]

What made you change to the GPL?

Design and testing

[Grab]

One of my pet peeves is lack of design, documentation, commenting and testing. I'd appreciate your views on how much you believe these are necessary. Do you design before you code, or do you just dive in? Do you like to provide loads of support documentation for users and co-workers, or are you of the "the-code-is-my-documentation" school?

More importantly, how do you enforce any such standard on your project, given that you've got other people submitting you code patches which may be technically perfect but visually obfuscated? And has this caused any friction, since managing coders is a "herding cats" scenario, and criticising someone's coding style is often taken very personally?

Grab.

NEDIT and your job + Developers

[vluther]

How do you balance your time with your job and
the project ?
I have my own little project (phpstocks.com).
Whenever I release a new version, it increases my site traffic to around a few thousand hits/day for a around 2-3 weeks.. then things settle down once again. I get a lot of questions on how do something, but no constructive critique
of the code. Or help with the code.
Secondly I have a full time job, in which I work 12-13 hrs/day.. I get paid hourly.. so it's not so bad as base salary only.. but still it makes it so that I can't have enough time to have a social life and to work on the project.

I guess my question is how do you balance your time, specially when there aren't 100's of programmers working round the clock ?

Reinventing the wheel

[pongo000]

One of the tenets set forth by Mike Gancarz in The Unix Philosophy is to implement the "90% solution." Implicit in this recommendation is the suggestion that efforts can be best directed towards other projects rather than focusing on the "100% solution." Given the myriad text editors that are already out there (including yours), don't you think that developer efforts would be better utilized by focusing on a small core of efficient tools, rather than reinventing the wheel?

Re:Reinventing the wheel

[Devil's Avocado]

NEdit == The Wheel

Have you tried to find a usable (vi does not qualify), cross-platform (flavors of *NIX, at least), lightweight, easily customizable (oops, there goes Emacs) text editor lately? There aren't so many out there.

Re:Not a question.

[delysid-x]

Me too! Well, second best... I prefer Ultraedit for windows because it has load from/save to ftp, which means I can edit php/pl/html/whatever remotely without the annoying ftp step. I saw a mention of the possibility of it being incorporated into future versions, PLEASE DO!

Re:You're missing a clue

[xjimhb]

"Plus, it doesn't require Gnome or KDE." That's the best reason I can think of NOT to use it. Both Gnome and KDE are available, and highly visible, when you install any recent Red Hat, or many other distros. I don't even KNOW if I have Motif, and the lst time I looked into it a couple of years back, Motif cost real money (like, over $100). Maybe there is a free version now, but even so making it a prereq is a downer - I'd much rather get something Gtk+ or Qt based since I have both easily available.

I've used, and still use, lots of editors. Vi's user interface sucks, but it's handy for some jobs (EMACS I have never even tried to learn). Windoze style editors are OK, I like gEdit. And for some work I still use a DOS line-based editor called TinyEdit which comes as a 10K exe file and beats out some editors 100 times as big. I can adapt to many editors, the MAIN thing is it has to be easy to get to, already installed or VERY EASY to install. Because of the Motif requirement, I don't plan to even TRY Nedit.

Re:Maybe because vi is obsolete and a piece of cra

[lpontiac]

aee and pico are far more user-friendly, smaller, and faster than vi (for those who use console-based apps).

Heh. pico doesn't even do autoindent, and I can't jump to a given line number. At least, according to it's help.

Nedit is the best, just not for teaching CS

[heroine]

It may not teach you common Lisp or demonstrate the latest trends in portable interface design but it edits text faster than anything else. The block selection features cut down formatting time.
The C commenting macros reduce #ifdef clutter, allowing you to try different designs quickly. Any time there's a text box in Netscape I write it out in Nedit and paste it in Netscape.

NEdit Rocks!

[MadSaxon]

NEDit is absolutely the most useful Unix utility I possess. I've been using NEdit exclusively for at least 5 years (except for the occasional recourse to vi when I'm in a hurry). I always have at least 3 NEdit windows open at any given time. If this product doesn't exemplify all that's good about the Open Software movement, I don't know what possibly could.

Low profile

[blakestah]

Nedit is a wonderful program. It does an incredible job of maintaining consistency with common Mac/Windoze keybindings, while offering incredible power to the power geek. We have quite a few users in our center.

Part of the reasons for its being low profile were the lack of perfect functionality with lesstif. This meant the quality version was staticly linked with Motif, and that many linux distributions would not ship it for licensing reasons.

It is really good to see that is over with, and it is similarly easy to predict a rapid increase in its use on free unices as the GPL version (with lesstif) gets shipped with all new linux distros.

My question: do you feel licensing issues can inadverdently affect acceptance of quality software, and how do you feel the Nedit team could have handled its licensing to avoid being left out of common linux distributions ?

I LOVE NEDIT!

[cr0sh]

I use it on my SuSE system almost every time I log on. I currently use WindowMaker as my WM, and after finally deciding to use this WM, I went and tried to find what text editor I wanted to use for coding and other things (I needed something that would work well for me for coding, as well as allow me to write up simple text documents and other such things), and NEdit is what fit the bill.

It works great for me! I don't think I would use it for extreme document layout stuff, but that isn't why I selected it - I selected it for coding. I have only found one problem, and I believe it is something I don't have configured right:

When using cut and paste, I can't paste data cut/copied from Netscape - other apps I can cut/paste from fine (in fact, I can cut/paste from Netscape to other apps fine as well, just not to NEdit). I can cut from Netscape, see the result sitting in the clipboard (XClip? - Can't remember the clipboard app name), but can't paste it into NEdit. Like I said, I think I don't have something set up properly (so many other things going on I haven't had time to look).

Other than that, it is perfect for what I need it to do (and I am sure I have an older build anyhow - I am currently running SuSE 6.3, updated to 2.1.14 kernel - and the NEdit is what came on the SuSE CD set).

I support the EFF - do you?

Re:You're missing a clue

[RocketJeff]

Both Gnome and KDE are available, and highly visible, when you install any recent Red Hat, or many other distros.

But not when you're running Solaris, AIX or any of the other non-Linux/BSD Unixes. IIRC, Nedit was originally written for SunOS where Motif come standard.

the lst time I looked into it a couple of years back, Motif cost real money

It must have been many years if you haven't heard of either Lestif the Motif clone or the recently released (and slightly misnamed) Open Motif. Both are available packaged in RPMs (since you mentioned Red Hat), which makes installation painless.

Oh and 1,000 different libraries are better?

[sips]

I actually program and install various components for programs and I feel that it's a real pain in the ass to force anyone to sit there and have to install that 5Mb library that one and only one program uses to display a fancy doodad. Look at the dependencies in debian if you don't believe me. The problem with them is that they install sometimes 20+Mb of libraries to run some little dinky program. Either way you pay for your code.

Not only would this make developing applications impossible, the memory and disk footprints would end up being LARGER!

But remember everyone and their mother dosn't have to give a shit about people like me who want to save money and keep a machine from being obselete next week because of their ever grander (and more lack luster) ideas.

Tell me exactly how in the absence of having the library instaled on my system and writing or at least cut/pasting the code into the program of my choice how the size will be any different? Ahhh you can't that's why. Why? Because they are the same size. I am not as dumb as you take me for. I see no reason to force thousands of libraries that OSS programs think they need just to run them for one application.

That is why linux really has started to suck. People think they need to have every possible library avaible for them and then they write one small dinky little application that uses that library for some trivial thing. If you ask I will even provide an example of such a program and then maybe you will believe me.

sips, frankly that is a horrendously stupid idea. The "c++ standard" has for example no facility to display a dialog box. Now by what you're suggesting, every time I write a program I have to write all the code to display
a dialog box.

No I am saying that if you wanted to and you didn't have the library installed that it would be just as easy to rip the code from the library and install it in the application that is being developed.

The one thing that has to be seen here is that sometimes you don't need say a complete library that will do every function in math through theoretical fields. Sometimes you only need to square a number of find an integral and that is all you need to do. What then? Is a full library install really necessary then? Do I really have to install that massive 50Mb of libraries to just find a simple answer to a simple problem in my program?

Re:Oh and 1,000 different libraries are better?

[Eccles]

Yeah, libraries are such a bad idea. Every program should statically compile the functions it needs because 50MB of disk is a lot more expensive than 100MB of ram.

I took a look at NEdit, and thought about downloading it for my work Win2000 box. Then I saw that to get it, I'd need to download and set up a laundry list of other items.

So Nedit is not on my machine now.

Why So Unstable?

[Anonymous Me]

First, let me say that I have used Nedit off and on for several years and that I love its user interface. It would certainly be my first choice for an editor except for the fact that it has never been as stable as emacs (which I've never been able to crash). While the (infrequent) crashes are more of an annoyance than a (serious) problem, my number one criterion for an editor is stability. What has been keeping you from reaching the stability of emacs or vi?

/. users are clueless -- stick to the topic

[GreatBallsOfFire]

Did any of you read the article? It has nothing to do with which editor is better, using motif or not, etc. The topic is what is it like to lead a low profile OSS/FS project. For quite some time, I was heavily involved in a lesser known OSS project, having written the core component for the project. Frankly, it was my experience that all the virtues that are touted by the usual OSS supporters don't apply. You don't get many eyes looking at the source. In fact, it seems that you get quite the opposite -- you get all the users who simply whine that you have a bug and demand it to be fixed. Some even go as far as to tell you how to fix it, but have never looked at the code so you get suggestions to modify code that is nowhere in the project. Mailing lists for the project seemed to be populated mainly by lurkers and only the very vocal minority seemed to communicate -- usually in off topic discussions. Given this somewhat dismal experience I had, has open source helped the project? Has there been much in the way of good feedback or is all the testing, bug fixes and additions of features done by the core team? Also, given the amount of work it takes to bring an OSS project to fruition, would you do it again knowing that it may not be very popular?

Your process

[Lumpy]

I have a simple non-technical question.

How do you keep going? As in when real life get's in the way. I head up 2 projects and there are times when the kids, my paying job, wife,etc.. keeps my development at a standstill.

How do you cope with life interfering with your projects?

Transition to a Larger Project

[fffreddie]

I first used nedit when it was supplied as an alternative to jot on SGIs and it was a fairly small program. I redicovered it recently and am a huge fan (it's the perfect editor for the kind of people who have issues with emacs). Has it been difficult to maintain focus as the scope of the project increases? Clearly you are concerned by bloated installations as the binary installation is still one file. Has it been difficult to make backward-incompatible decisions as features have grown from experimental to cornerstone? - the main example being the expansion of the macro system. P.S. I have a load of requests waiting for the web wishlist system to appear...

York U

[c.r.o.c.o]

At York U, in Toronto, NEdit is the default editor, at least for one of the CS labs (the Ariel lab for those who know my U).

I've never used it though because I thought it was just some editor that comes by default with Solaris. And since they have pico, I didn't bother trying it out...

I guess I'll give it a try now, but still, IMO, the console rules, especially when it comes to writing code...

Nedit rocks :-)

[Gerv]

I love NEdit - the Windows key combinations are too deeply ingrained in my head to make it at all easy to use an editor which doesn't support them. You even have a version for SunOS, which our Comlab runs here at Oxford.

However, sometimes I have to use Windows, and the Windows "port" of NEdit seems a bit heavyweight, what with it requiring an X server.

Are there any decent free software editors for Windows? I've tried PFE, but it can't cope with mouse wheel scrolling. I currently use ConTEXT, which is OK. But can I do better?

(Anyone else, feel free to answer this :-)

Gerv

low profile?

[Lord Omlette]

"Leading A Low-Profile Free Software Project" What's the difference between a low profile and a high profile project? Did you start the project to scratch an itch or attract attention?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057

[OT] Re: UltraEdit

[KnightStalker]

I've been trying to find a unix (console or X, doesn't matter) replacement for UltraEdit for *quite* a while... nothing comes close. Emacs is a pain in the ass, but it might have the potential. I'm getting used to it (slowly) :-)

And UE doesn't run well under WINE... somebody get Ian Mead to port it!!!

Re:[OT] Re: UltraEdit

[yem]

I was in the same position as you. At the time (6-9 months ago) I emailed the authors of UltraEdit and TextPad to ask about porting to linux. Both of them said that it is a possibility they are considering. However nothing's happened yet.

I've tried Nedit several times in the last two years and every time I end up with a bug where the Ctrl-?? hotkeys cease to function and start dropping odd xml type tags into the document. It does this intermittently but always eventually. Killed it for me.

Now I use xemacs - I just wish it would colour highlight more languages (jsp, xml, xslt in particular).

Re:[OT] Re: UltraEdit

[Devil's Avocado]

That happens when you have the Num-Lock or Scroll-Lock key turned on. It's a problem with the way Motif treats modifiers (Num-Lock + Key != Key). It's in the FAQ. There's a patch for it in the mailing list archives. Incidentally, I went the other way -- I had to find a Windows editor that was comparable to NEdit. UltraEdit is the closest I got, but I'm afraid that with the power that NEdit has under the hood with the macro language, the customizability of the auto-indentation engine, the flexible syntax hilighting, etc, UltraEdit came up severely lacking.

How about GTK or QT?

[nathanm]

I've been using Nedit for a little over a year now. I really like it, but have one issue. I usually compile everything from source, but Nedit doesn't want to compile, even with the latest version of Lesstif. I ended up having to download & use a statically linked binary.

My question is this: Are there any plans to port Nedit to a more modern toolkit, like GTK or QT?

Try NoteTab Lite

[Baron of Greymatter]

It's free, not written by Micro$oft, and it is probably the best editor for the Wincrap platform ever written. It has sidebars for HTML and a few other things, plus it can strip HTML tags automatically and completely (very few errors).

It is available at www.notetab.com

And, oh BTW, it runs rather well under WINE but it's a bit slow and the icons in the toolbar don't always show. But all other functions work.

------------------------------------------------ --

Several comments and questions

[ecloud]

I love NEdit. At home it's always my first choice for any kind of coding. At work we have SlickEdit but that's expensive, and annoyingly slow sometimes.

For some reason Debian puts NEdit in the non-free section. That means it doesn't come on the CDs. I was doing an install for a friend on his laptop, and NEdit is his favorite editor too, so this was kindof annoying; now he's got to get a NIC working in order to download it. So maybe you could look into making it truly free software? I wish I knew what the objection is...probably something silly.

I also don't like the use of Motif. Not that Motif is getting in the way, it's just a minor nit for the usual reasons (lack of themability, having to load a library that I don't use for much else, or use a statically linked version which wastes memory). I do love the fact that it runs on other platforms like Solaris, but now that Sun is going to be using Gnome I guess that means GTK will always be available also.

I have a lot of trouble with shortcut keys lately; in older versions they used to work perfectly, but now it seems that it takes time to notice that the control key is down; for instance I usually have to press control-C several times to successfully copy to the clipboard. Sometimes I've even seen it insert control characters into the text when I press the keys, like control-S comes out as or something like that; but this is an intermittent problem which often goes away if I close NEdit and start a new copy. The not-noticing-control-C problem does not go away.

I love the column selection features; that and indent/outdent and macros are the major things I want to have in a code editor beyond the usual features. It's just a little quirky compared to other editors like SlickEdit or most Windows code editors that indent/outdent is not done with tab/shift-tab, and drag-n-drop is done with the middle mouse button. I can deal with these quirks but I'd rather be able to customize them.

A means to choose a character encoding and thereby switch to an appropriate font would be nice. I sometimes use NEdit to practice my Russian, and have to manually change the font to Cronyx Fixed, which is KOI8 encoded. (But I don't want to use that font all the time, because it is not as easy on the eyes as Lucida.) Fortunately NEdit allows me to type 8-bit characters (I use xrus to switch the keyboard into that mode), otherwise it would not have been possible at all. But there is that dialog where the default fonts are set; it would be nice if I could also set fonts to use for various other encodings, in an extensible way (like add an encoding, add a font to go with it, instead of only having a fixed set of encodings). Then have an easy-to-access menu to choose an encoding while editing, from the known set.

I hope NEdit continues to improve and asymptotically approach a bug-free state. Good luck to you with it.

Re:Several comments and questions

[KnightStalker]

I don't know, but I'm sure the objection is only that it uses Motif, which is non-free.

Re:Several comments and questions

[yem]

The Ctrl-?? hotkey bug killed it for me. I read something on the nedit site about changing something in the X config to fix it but I never could cure this problem.

I use xemacs now.

I hope this problem can be resolved because Nedit really is a very nice editor

Re:Several comments and questions

[Soruk]

I personally use Nedit dynamically linked against Lesstif... and it still hasn't crashed on me yet. Using it with Lesstif, it becomes completely free.

Re:Several comments and questions

[ecloud]

I know. Debian distributes it linked against LessTif, so I don't think that's the reason it's non-free; it would have to do with NEdit's own license. I also have never had it crash.

Re:Several comments and questions

[Soruk]

I can only assume Debian is using a version older than 5.1, since from 5.1 NEdit has been released under the GPL.

Just tell them..

[deacon]

Since you are asking this question, you are not a "big-headed know-it-all". If someone you are helping thinks you are big-headed, that is a reflection of their insecurity, and I suggest you shrug it off.

If you want to really soft-pedal your stuff, you might point people to your software without telling them up front that you wrote it.. the smarter ones will figure it out for themselves.

As an aside, I wish more people making software available would give users an obvious way to thank/reward them in some way..

If a software author said on their web page that they collect local bumper stickers, or maps, or beer coasters, say so and I'd be happy to send some.

How do you compete?

[Malc]

What does NEdit offer that Emacs doesn't? How do you compete or market yourselves against successful and established products? Do you even want to?

Re:How do you compete?

[erice]

Nedit has an intuitive and efficient interface combined with enough power for non-trivial work. That is remarkably rare among text editors.

Some editors are extremeley capaable. Emacs certainly has a richer feature set then Nedit is likely to ever have. But it comes at a price. The interface is not intuitive and many moderate operations require complex interaction.

vi can be highly efficient in terms of keystrokes but is also unintuitive and lacks the raw power of emacs.

There are many obscure X based editors. They are generally easy to learn but terrible to use and seriously lacking in power.

Editors are such a personal thing. Little nuances can change everything. Emacs vs vi is not enough choice to choose on nuances. Adding Nedit still isn't enough but it's better. I would say we need at least 5 generally useable editors. (i.e 5 editors that will do virtually any job you want. Pick one you like)

few responses is good

[wayne]

Imagine what it would be like for Linus if he got one email per 100-500 donwloads?

vim

[lemox]

Try vim. The windows version looks almost exactly like the gtk version. You can either grab the dos-box version (vim) or the GUI version (gvim).

That way, you have the exact same editing enviroment for both linux and windows.

working on NEdit for a living

[mykmelez]

If you had the business plan/funding/etc. for a company that would pay you to develop NEdit for a living, would you?

FTE the way

[nchip]

fte is the best "windows" keybinding editor around.

Then again, emacs's pc-select (activated with meta-x pc-select) is usually good enough, if you just like the shift+arrow shift+del & stuff.

Whatever. after learning the basics vi i've been using alarming lot just vim for random editing.

Instead of joining the religous editor war, I'm happily using them all.

Nedit - well it depended on motif, which made me skip it on the first place. ugly and used to be nonfree.

Re:You're missing a clue

[jaclu]

But nowadays Solaris comes default with Gnome as windowmanager...

Sure there's a need

[barzok]

Even if you don't want an enhancement, it's nice to let a developer know "hey, I downloaded this thing you wrote and I think it's really cool. Keep up the good work!"

Can't speak for everyone, but I know I'm a lot more enthusiastic about coding if I know people appreciate the work, even (especially) if they don't have any needs/wants for new features.

Re:Sure there's a need

[Stinking Pig]

I've got 701 RPMs installed on the box I'm typing with, and that doesn't count the fifty-odd programs I compiled from source. Make no mistake, I am certainly grateful that these programs work together to facilitate my work and play, but I don't think individually thanking all the developers is a feasible suggestion.

Thanks, guys!

Re:Nedit rocks :-) - vim's good

[goon]

vim has a good win32 port.
http://www.vim.org
http://www.vim.org/binaries.html

Re:You're missing a clue

[Sax Maniac]

The binary distributions do not require you to install or buy Motif at all. Much effort has been made to make the installation as simple as possible: one binary file. The install is so trivial, there is none.

If you have on OS that comes with Motif, the binaries dynamically link with it to save you some memory. If you have an OS that doesn't come with Motif, the binary statically links with Motif so you don't have to install or buy it.

Either way, it just works.

`Native' win32 port?

[drsparkly]

Are there any plans to develop a native win32 port of nedit? I love this editor but unfortunately I'm not working under linux all the time. Good free code editors for windows are rare, nedit would fill that gap nicely!

NEdit - The Editor of Champions

[g8oz]

I don't why people put up with arcane crap like vi. Maybe it makes them feel like 'real' programmers.

Re:NEdit - The Editor of Champions

[Pimpy]

That is all a personal preference, I personally don't find vi arcane at all, I find it to be an excellent solid editor and I would never even consider using something else. When the job needs to be done and done right you use vi. I don't know how anyone can stand to write code or adjust config files outside of a console environment, but for those that do there are other editors that people can use. Again, this all goes back to the personal preference thing, getting into petty disputes over which editor is better is a waste of time.

Re:NEdit - The Editor of Champions

[GypC]

Because knowing vi allows you to telnet into any *nix box and edit text files with a reasonably powerful editor (it's especially powerful for repetitive and formatted text like configuration files). Since almost all system configuration in *nix is done with plain text files, this is incredibly useful. Especially in a data center like the one I work in with 4 different flavors of *nix.

"Free your mind and your ass will follow"

Re:NEdit - The Editor of Champions

[Savant]

>I don't why people put up with arcane crap like
>vi. Maybe it makes them feel like 'real'
>programmers.

I like Nedit. Perhaps it would be fairer to say I love Nedit. I use it constantly. But vi, for
a touch-typing developer who's willing to learn the shortcuts is a far far superior editor. I
don't touch-type, and exposure to Windows at an early age has unfortunately allowed Ctrl-X,
Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to have certain associations in my head with cutting, copying and pasting.
Recently though, I have been learning to touch-type and as a result I've come to understand
why vi and emacs are so loved. Try scrolling up and down, on the keyboard, without moving your
hands away from the main area of the home keys. In vi, Ctrl-U and Ctrl-D page you up and down,
and hjkl are cursors. Want to delete a word and a half - say 8 letters or so - and put
something else in? In vi you type 8, hit s and go. In nedit, you highlight with either the
mouse or the cursors, then hit delete. Again, your hands have moved from the home keys. Vi is
designed for the expert, the touch-typist. Nedit is really just like a Windows text editor -
although it's superior to virtually anything actually native to windows, it is designed for the
non-touch-typing user of Windows shortcuts. Eventually I hope to leave off using Nedit
completely, excellent editor that it is, in favour of vim. Nedit's main advantage over vim is
that it has a decent macro language; if you are using emacs instead of vi (with emacs, most of
the same arguments as with vi apply) you have that already, but given the power of shell
scripts using grep, sed, awk etc I don't really think I need that capability built into my
editor when I can flip back and forwards between my shell and my editor without leaving the
home key area. It is worthwhile learning both vi and shell bindings, for, if you touch-type,
knowing them will make you more productive.

Savant

The self-conscious coder issue?

[drix]

There have been many times when I've wanted to undertake a project and release the source but haven't simply because I'm self-conscious about the code I write. I feel almost embarassed at the thought of someone seeing sloppy, inelegant code with my name on it. I'm just curious if a.) you've ever had this problem and b.) in general, what have people's responses been (i.e. flames, a patch and some consoling words, etc.)?

--

Re:The self-conscious coder issue?

[Pimpy]

Everyone has this problem initially, if you want to see sloppy and inelagant code take a look at the code for CVS. If you don't go running off in terror in the first 5 minutes, you're doing something wrong. In order for code to be fixed and to get anywhere it needs more people looking at it, you should be open to criticism and welcome any input you get. Even if its not good, at least you'll learn what you did wrong and try not to repeat it the second time around.

Oh, and..

[jonabbey]

Begging your email list for feedback doesn't work, I tried that.

;-)

Use Sourceforge?

[j|m]

I know that this is Slashdot, owned by the same company as Sourceforge, but here is the question: should somebody trying to start an OSS or Free Software project use the resources provided by SourceForge?

The reason I ask is because the services offered are second to none, but its high quality has attracted so many users that now any project hosted there seems to be second-rate. I have, for example, some friends who will, upon seeing any *.sourceforge.net URL, say "Oh, just another SourceForge project. Just another OSS wannabe."

I realize that the story is different for projects that thrive elsewhere and just use SourceForge for its rather, um, unique services. But still, for one that is just starting out... is it a good idea?

Re:Use Sourceforge?

[Pimpy]

That is indeed one of the biggest problems with sourceforge, with a site that hosts thousands upon thousands of projects there are bound to be a good number that never get anywhere. However, there are still huge amounts of projects on sourceforge that do get somewhere, and having a resource like sourceforge available to you makes getting somewhere all the more easier. Most people don't want to go through the hassle of having to setup a dedicated server to put up an ftp/www/cvs server, and admining it. Sourceforge takes care of all these little headaches for you and allows you to focus on the important thing, writing code. If the resource is available to you, I say use it.

Why GPL?

[jcn]

What convinced your boss to drop the silly license?

Why didn't you try before, or why didn't it convince her before?

Re:If it can handle emacs key bindings i'm interes

[Devil's Avocado]

How many programs besides Emacs require the user to type C-x C-c to exit? Is it reasonable to require any new editor to adhere to an interface designed before there were any such things as interface standards?

Ah, but what about all the people who already know the ins and outs of Emacs? As the number of Linux users grows, the percentage of users who will tolerate typing C-x C-f to open a file in one program, unlike the rest of the programs they use which ask for C-o, will diminish. To put it simply, NEdit was designed for those who desire a consistent, *modern* interface, not to win over those who have memorized the arcana of vi or Emacs.

As for RSI and avoiding the mouse, NEdit was the first program that convinced me that a GUI doesn't equate to forcing the user to use the mouse. Having lurked on the NEdit developer mailing list for quite some time I can tell you that keyboard usability is one of the central forces that influences design decisions in NEdit.

NEdit Unstable? Not a chance.

[Devil's Avocado]

First, let me say that I have used NEdit every day for several years and it has never, let me repeat that, never, crashed on me unless I was using a beta version.

This is not to say that it never crashes for anybody, but most every issue that has come up with NEdit has turned out to be a bug in Lesstif. If you use the statically linked version or get the Open Motif libraries you should have no stability problems whatsoever.

NEdit has its issues, but stability is _really_ not one of them.

Re:You're missing a clue

[Devil's Avocado]

Motif requirement? It's a statically linked binary. There is no Motif requirement. You download it and you run it. You don't even have to compile or install it. Super cool for systems where you don't have root.

Oh, and as others have pointed out Lesstif or Open Motif are free and available if you really want to go the dynamic linking route.

Nedit low profile ?

[Xavier]

I don't think that NEdit is that 'low profile', as far as i know, NEdti is always the one comming after Emacs and Vi ( Vim ) when it comes to unix syntax higlighting editors ( not to speak about macro facilities )

And with the growing 'I come from windows' people, NEdit here gain more and more users due to its ease of use.

Low profile, NEdit ?? hrmm

Re:Maybe because vi is obsolete and a piece of cra

[Soruk]

and I can't jump to a given line number

^W^T

Unexpected porting results

[bolthole]

5. (I hate to admit this...) Exult didn't start getting a lot of users until one of the contributors ported it to Win32, after I had replaced the X code with SDL.

I had a similiar, yet not so soul-imperiling experience with my main free program :-) I develop on Solaris. Before that, SunOS. But I made a point of keeping the code as portable as I knew how.

And so, even though I'd never touched linux: I somehow aquired a large portion of my user base as linux users. When I noticed that, I started posting updates to comp.os.linux.announce... and got even MORE linux users :-)

Then someone made a debian package out of it. So it gets even MORE linux exposure :-)

Open Source Software Development Process

[Darkling-MHCN]

There is a huge wealth of information about the practices and processes of developing closed source projects. Does the development of open source projects require a new approach to software development or can much of the closed source doctrines be applied in an open source project ? Also can you list the steps that you think are key to a quality open source development process ?