3 ms·

I still miss NEdit. Around 2001 when I started getting into Linux seriously, I was also reading a lot about cults - Scientology had recently, infamously, force

I still miss NEdit. Around 2001 when I started getting into Linux seriously, I was also reading a lot about cults - Scientology had recently, infamously, forced Slashdot to take down a comment about their secret practices. One of the things I read was that a common cult trick was to demand that people re-learn basic skills so that they do them the "right" way, like reading (Scientology did that), eating (chew X times!), using the phone etc. So here's this system that demands I need to learn basic text editing all over? Nope, not joining that cult! We Amiga kids had had graphical editors for a long time! So I got the best modern text editor Linux had at the time, NEdit from fermilab. It was almost entirely CUA + the conventions we use today (which aren't entirely what we used in 2001). And the unusual features it had, such as square selection and X-style middle click copying, were quick to pick up. It was also tiny, both in binary size and memory footprint. Sadly it didn't really survive the switch to utf-8. I switched to Slava Pestov's Jedit for many years, and did some cool things with its huge library of extensions. But when VSCode started doing IDE stuff better than most IDEs, I defected to that. Yes yes, electron, Microsoft, I know... but it's just so damn convenient.

dwedge 1mo ago
This is both the blessing and the curse of terminal based interfaces (I don't like to say TUI anymore since it makes me think of bubbletea style programs now). The curse being that there is way too much initial learning of how to use it (not that much, you can get by with half a dozen vim keys for years - I used vim for a decade before learning yank) but enough to be frustrating at first. The blessing is that once you master the basics they are very quick and very powerful. GUIs are more intuitive but the options have to be visual so they are always cluttered in my opinions. For most software it doesn't really matter but I want my text editor to let me type without latency or visual clutter and almost nothing else is anywhere near as important. I've tried GUIs many times (vscode, sublime, atom, zed, bbedit, intellij) but I always end up back in vim with CLI git to the point that I get asked in screen share sessions to just use a GUI. It's all personal preference
gtr 1mo ago
I loved nedit back in the day. I wrote my entire PhD thesis in LaTeX using it. I think the only reason I picked it over emacs (which I was using for coding) was that the text line wrapping was sane out of the box.
badsectoracula 1mo ago
I still use nedit pretty much daily whenever i want to note something down - basically kinda like Notepad (though obviously nedit is much more featureful... not that i use the extra features though). Win+R (my Window Maker shortcut for showing the Run dialog) -> nedit is something that i do pretty much automatically when i want to take a quick note.
jillesvangurp 1mo ago
Can't say I miss nedit. But it was alright for the mid nineties when I used it on university workstations (a mix of Sun, HP, and SGI hardware). I also got into Jedit for a while. Nice editor and the plugin system it had was pretty advanced for the time. This before we had the option of using something like javascript to do the same kinds of things (like vs code and other editors now do). Java had the ability to dynamically load jar files for plugins at run time. These days I use VS Code which is more than fine for my needs and it of course has a very rich plugin ecosystem. I never really got into vi, Emacs, or other terminal editors. I can use vi in a pinch (on remote servers when there's nothing else). For most programming I prefer full IDEs. (intellij for the last few years). Or at least I used to; these days it's mostly agentic coding tools doing the editing for me.
wazoox 1mo ago
Ah ah I'm also a NEdit fan. Still using XNEdit at times (the version that supports UTF-8, https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit ), because I've written so many small tools in its weird built-in language. For several years I've even hosted the nedit.org website :)
isr 1mo ago
Hey, greetings from another former nedit user. It was my refuge from emacs on my 1997 redhat setup as I was stumbling around learning the ropes (I had to keep referring To my "Linux in a nutshell" book to remind myself how to open, save & quit in emacs) Nedit was a godsend, until I decided to look into that other weird editor (vim) that I kept hearing about (circa 1999 or so) ...

dwedge 1mo ago

This is both the blessing and the curse of terminal based interfaces (I don't like to say TUI anymore since it makes me think of bubbletea style programs now). The curse being that there is way too much initial learning of how to use it (not that much, you can get by with half a dozen vim keys for years - I used vim for a decade before learning yank) but enough to be frustrating at first. The blessing is that once you master the basics they are very quick and very powerful. GUIs are more intuitive but the options have to be visual so they are always cluttered in my opinions. For most software it doesn't really matter but I want my text editor to let me type without latency or visual clutter and almost nothing else is anywhere near as important. I've tried GUIs many times (vscode, sublime, atom, zed, bbedit, intellij) but I always end up back in vim with CLI git to the point that I get asked in screen share sessions to just use a GUI. It's all personal preference

gtr 1mo ago

I loved nedit back in the day. I wrote my entire PhD thesis in LaTeX using it. I think the only reason I picked it over emacs (which I was using for coding) was that the text line wrapping was sane out of the box.

badsectoracula 1mo ago

I still use nedit pretty much daily whenever i want to note something down - basically kinda like Notepad (though obviously nedit is much more featureful... not that i use the extra features though). Win+R (my Window Maker shortcut for showing the Run dialog) -> nedit is something that i do pretty much automatically when i want to take a quick note.

jillesvangurp 1mo ago

Can't say I miss nedit. But it was alright for the mid nineties when I used it on university workstations (a mix of Sun, HP, and SGI hardware). I also got into Jedit for a while. Nice editor and the plugin system it had was pretty advanced for the time. This before we had the option of using something like javascript to do the same kinds of things (like vs code and other editors now do). Java had the ability to dynamically load jar files for plugins at run time. These days I use VS Code which is more than fine for my needs and it of course has a very rich plugin ecosystem. I never really got into vi, Emacs, or other terminal editors. I can use vi in a pinch (on remote servers when there's nothing else). For most programming I prefer full IDEs. (intellij for the last few years). Or at least I used to; these days it's mostly agentic coding tools doing the editing for me.

wazoox 1mo ago

Ah ah I'm also a NEdit fan. Still using XNEdit at times (the version that supports UTF-8, https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit https://github.com/unixwork/xnedit ), because I've written so many small tools in its weird built-in language. For several years I've even hosted the nedit.org website :)

isr 1mo ago

Hey, greetings from another former nedit user. It was my refuge from emacs on my 1997 redhat setup as I was stumbling around learning the ropes (I had to keep referring To my "Linux in a nutshell" book to remind myself how to open, save & quit in emacs) Nedit was a godsend, until I decided to look into that other weird editor (vim) that I kept hearing about (circa 1999 or so) ...