![]() It also has the ability to do pan scrolling. It supports dragging and droping of text and has a programmable context menu. NEdit doesn't just support one form of selection, but it supports line and rectangular selections, and also supports two different forms of selection at the same time: primary and secondary. When the mouse is the better tool, then I am going to use it, but I want a powerful program that takes full advantage of the mouse. Mice are faster at doing some things than the keyboard, and those of us who love our keyboards should face this fact. Sure, normal editors let you select text, cut, copy and paste, but that's only so good, and only takes you so far. Now, this is something you don't find with any other editor that I know of except for Acme: efficient and effective utilization of the mouse. That's what's nice about NEdit, you get all this great stuff, but the interface never gets more complex than Notepad. But it doesn't get in your way or clutter up the interface. Of course, there is full Ctags support built into NEdit as well. I have a calltips file which looks up the signatures for all my Scheme code, and I can load a custom calltips file for each project I am working on. NEdit has full support for Calltips, which do just this. One of the nice things IDEs give you, and this includes Emacs, is the ability to look up the signature of a procedure without a lot of clicking around, by simply highlighting a procedure call, and hitting some keystroke or button. Using the macro language, I can also write smart auto indentation that let's me intelligently indent my code if I want. If I want to do my own transformations, I can write my own text manipulations in the macro language, or I can pipe my text out to a shell command. You'd be surprised how little you need to be productive, and how much nicer it can be. For you IDE junkies, you can integrate in NEdit with your IDEs, or you can switch over to NEdit + Xterm and see how simple life can be. I have mine set to have four menu items, so that I can build documentation, plain scheme files, scheme libraries, and scheme modules with a simple menu selection using my Makefiles. Not only that, I want to easily test my creations, so with NEdit's shell integration, I can run shell commands that interact with my files. Using hierarchical syntax highlighting I can easily get the right syntax highlighting at each level. One is TeX for the documentation language, and the other is Scheme code. This means that I have two syntax highlighting schemes in one document. Right now, I use NEdit to program Scheme in a Literate Programming style based on noweb. For you CLI junkies, I want to convince you that mouse-based editing really is a good thing. If you are a big IDE guy, I want to try to convince you that a sleeker editor will make your life easier. It is an amazing piece of software, because it combines the power of the UNIX environment with a sleek, easy to use package that has tons of functionality in there. Not only does NEdit do both, but it has been the quintessential UNIX Text Editor for ages. Either they are easy to use at first, and don't grow, or vice versa. Still, you ask yourself, will it grow to the power I need once I am out of the newbie stage? For most editors, you can't get both. Does this matter? Well, it matters if you want others to try your editor out. From start to finish, this is an editor that grows with you, and has a much less steep learning curve than Vi or Emacs. I want to convince you to try your hand with an editor that is remarkably simple, and still remarkably powerful. While there, your choice of editor will usually boil down to one of three solutions: 1) Classic editors, 2) Enterprise IDEs a la Eclipse, or 3) them stinkin' default editors in the Desktop Environment your system uses (KWrite, GEdit, &c.). If you know what you are about, you'll probably spend some time on a UNIX box or a Linux machine of some sort. And programmers use text editors all the time. Fair enough, but the ones who know what they are doing use TeX or LaTeX. Most writers tend to use something like Microsoft Word. ![]() So, what do you use your computer for? Are you a writer? A programmer? Maybe you just like to write games? Well, if you do any sort of editing of text, you use some sort of text editor.
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