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-5.4-irix.tar.Z
% tar xvf nedit-5.4-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-5.4-linux-x86.tar.Z
% tar xvf nedit-5.4-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.

Next, some version specific upgrading issues are listed. Note that non-incremental upgrading (eg., from 5.0 to 5.2) is supported too.

Upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2

There are no major changes in the format of the .nedit file for version 5.2. NEdit will try to insert additional entries for the newly supported language modes and syntax highlighting patterns (CSS, Regex, and XML) and highlight styles (Pointer, Regex, Warning). Moreover, the formerly boolean 'showMatching' option will silently be converted to a tri-state value. Users that have customized some of the syntax highlighting patterns may consider restoring the default patterns, as many of them have been improved considerably.

Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1

NEdit 5.1 makes significant changes to the syntax of regular expressions. Mostly, these are upward compatible, but two changes; introducing the brace operator, and changing the meaning of \0; are not. Brace characters must now be escaped with backslash, and & must be used in place of \0 in substitutions.

NEdit 5.1 employs a built-in upgrade mechanism which will automatically detect pre-5.1 .nedit files and fix regular expressions which appear in user-defined highlight patterns. The automatic upgrade mechanism, however, can not fix regular expression problems within user-defined macros. If you have a macro which is failing under NEdit 5.1, you will have to fix it by hand.

Upgrading from pre-5.0

If you are upgrading from a pre-5.0 version of NEdit, there are significant changes to the macro language, and you are best off simply editing out the nedit.macroCommands section of your .nedit file, generating a new .nedit file, and then re-introducing your user-written commands into the new file. Most macros written for previous versions will function properly under the new macro language. The most common problems with old macros is lack of a terminating newline on the last line of the macro, and the addition of <, >, and now { to the regular expression syntax. These characters must now be escaped with a \ (backslash). Also, if you have been using a font other than the default for the text portion of your NEdit windows, be sure to check the Preferences -> Default Settings -> Text Font dialog, and select highlighting fonts which match your primary font in size. Matching in height is desirable, but not essential, and sometimes impossible to achive on some systems. When fonts don't match in height, turning on syntax highlighting will cause the window size to change slightly. NEdit can handle unmatched font sizes (width), but leaving them unmatched means sometimes columns and indentation don't line up (as with proportional fonts).