NEdit Features

[Tony Balinski]

Quoting Thorsten Haude <yoo at vranx.de>:

> Moin,
>
> * Valerio Messina wrote (2007-03-28 01:07):
> >I'm speaking with a friend about Nedit features, and I linked him to page:
> >http://www.nedit.org/features.php
> >then I realize in that page, regular expression matching and multi-tab
> >is not mentioned
>
> I want to add these, including the phrase: "Regex support throughout
> the program, with a feature set close to PCRE"
>
> Are we close to PCRE? I'm not aware of anything missing except for the
> bounded size on look-behinds, but then again, I rarely use PCRE.

It's been a long time since I looked, but I think PCRE has other things
like callbacks for discovered (parenthesised) groups, an unlimited (IIRC)
number of groups supported (at least higher than 9), and a Unicode version.
But I think on supported syntax we're very close. I think the standard to
watch here is the ECMAScript one. Isn't that the basis for the C++ Regex
library to go into C++0x? (I think Perl 6 is making fundamental changes i
RE syntax too.)

> >seems Win32 "tested" executable is not available.
>
> NEdit has always been Unix, I don't even have a Windows desktop. I
> think if Jörg agrees we should integrate his work on the main page.
> Jörg, what do you think?

Apart from a few minor gripes, nedit under cygwin works fine. Building
your own from the sources tarball is very easy. The worst part (and that's
not too hard) is setting up Cygwin/X and making a shortcut for your
favourite editor! The main issues for me in using nedit with Cygwin/X
are the slightly inadequate Lesstif file dialog box (which doesn't resize
its elements properly) and the "native windows" window manager which allows
a dialog to hide under its parent window!

Tony