From: Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@...>
Date: 2003-10-11T06:07:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Extension Language for a Text Editor

Nikolai Weibull wrote:

> ...
>
>>Not to discourage you, but have you looked at NEdit?  It doesn't have a
>>full scripting language, but it has some nice pattern recognition
>>mechanisms.  And it's GPL.  (OTOH, I've never gotten their source to
>>compile...they don't use a standard make system, but something of their
>>own creation that seems to me to have problems.)
>>    
>>
>Yes.  And let me tell you, it's crap.  Sorry, I don't want to heat up
>the discussion here, but in my eyes, NEdit just isn't very good.  It's
>an attempt to bring Windows like editors to Unix.  It has a lot of weird
>design decisions that I just don't like (and neither do many of the
>people I've spoken to about it at the Computer Technics (whatever that's
>really called in English) Department at Uni).  It's just not powerful
>enough.  Vim _is_ powerful enough, but it still feels wrong somehow.
>Anyway,
>	nikolai
>...
>  
>
Interesting.  The thing I really like about it is that it's easy to 
define a new language in.  (Just last month I defined D [Digital Mars D 
from Walter {Bright ??}.])  Now they do this with pattern recognition, 
largely regular expressions, which don't suffice for complex parsing, 
but are pretty good.  Good enough to make editing a lot easier.  And 
because of that I always have it installed.  If kate knows about it, 
then I prefer kate, largely because it's windows are cleaner.  But the 
incremental search works much better in NEdit.  I'll grant you that it's 
been around along time (I suspect that the Windows editors were taken 
from it rather than the converse), and it's had a few different people 
maintaining it with different styles, so the code-base probably isn't 
too clean, and certainly won't match recent theories of program design.  
And the dialogs are the old form, and not as responsive as the newer 
ones that are adapted to either Gnome or KDE.  But I definitely prefer 
using it to vim or gvim.  I've tried.  (In text mode, I prefer 
vim...well, actually vi, but that's vim these days.  But I don't spend 
any time there these last several years.)