Installing

To install NEdit on Unix systems, copy the appropriate archive file to your system, and use gunzip and tar to expand the archive. For example:

% uncompress nedit-5.5-IRIX.tar.Z
% tar xvf nedit-5.5-IRIX.tar

Insert the correct file name on the command line. If you don't have uncompress on your system, gunzip knows how to handle it:

% gunzip nedit-5.5-Linux-x86.tar.Z
% tar xvf nedit-5.5-Linux-x86.tar

Copy the files nedit and nc, to a directory which is referenced in the paths of the target users. The usual location for installing nedit for system-wide use is /usr/local/bin, or for individual use, $HOME/bin.

On VMS systems, nedit must be defined as a foreign command so that it can process command line arguments. For example, if nedit.exe were in the directory mydir on the disk called mydev, adding the following line to your login.com file would define the nedit command:

$ ned*it :== $mydev:[mydir]nedit.exe

To use NEdit in client/server mode, you also need the nedit client program, nc, which, again, needs no special installation, except in the VMS case, as above. On some systems, the name nc may conflict with an existing program. In that case, choose a different name for the executable and simply rename it. The recommend alternative is ncl.

Don't forget to put the man-pages for nedit and nc into a place where your man command is able to find them (e.g. /usr/man/man1/nedit.1)

Upgrading NEdit

As of version 5.1, NEdit employs a built-in upgrade mechanism which will automatically detect .nedit files of older versions. In general, NEdit will try to convert and insert entries to match the latest version. However, in certain cases where the user has customized the default entries, NEdit will leave them untouched (except for possible syntactic conversions). As a result, the latest syntax highlighting patterns for certain languages may not get activated, for instance, if the user has customized the entries. The latest default patterns can always be activated through the Preferences -> Syntax Highlighting -> Recognition Patterns menu, though.

You should also pay attention to the section of the README file included with the NEdit distribution called COMPATIBILITY WITH PREVIOUS VERSIONS for specific issues that may arise when upgrading.