Feature request

[Tony Balinski]

Quoting Arjan van Dijk <Arjan.van.Dijk at rivm.nl>:

> Hi,
>
> Recently I found the freeware text-editor named PSPad at www.pspad.com.
> It only runs on a Windows-system, but it has some interesting features.

Looks cool. I'll give it a spin.

> As a feature-request for NEdit, I would like to have your attention for the
> following
> in particular:
>
> - Backlight-marked diff of two files in vertically split-screen. On the
> left you have one version of a document, on the right a different
> version. Any scrolling is done synchronized. Additions from left version
> to right version are marked in green backlighting, deletions in red
> backlighting and "other modifications" in orange. Layout is adapted such
> that maximum similarity is achieved. Very handy!

I get a lot of what this gives using my diff macros (an old-ish version of
which is at http://www.nedit.org/niki/index.php/FileMerge; my version relies
on extra stuff built into my non-standard nedit) and TK Soh's Synchronous
Scrolling patch (patch #774820 on http://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit). It's
one of the reasons I implemented the original rangeset functionality. To do it
properly though would require more work, in particular to allow an arbitrary
amount of vertical space to be displayed at a particular line-end.

> - You can put a vertical hair-line at a column. In FORTRAN most
> compilers truncate source after the 72-th position. With the hairline
> set after the 72-th position, I never make mistakes with this anymore.

Thorsten's Patch Collection includes a margin hairline which you can set.
This is patch #1058246 on http://sourceforge.net/projects/nedit.

> - You can select whether or not the editor has to trim trailing spaces off
> each line.

This is usually done using a macro; the trouble is that you must invoke the
macro when you save the file (or at other times). A preference (with
language-specific default?) setting for this might well be a good idea.

> - Independently from the former item, you can indicate if you want the
> cursor to follow the ragged end-of-line locations during scrolling with
> the arrow-keys, or allow it to go beyond the end-of-line (without
> modifying the text as long as you don't type).

I don't see the point of this unless, when you do type, the space between
line-end and cursor is automatically padded.

> - Use multiple spaces instead of tab. Also during smart-indenting.

This can be done already with the Preferences>Default Settings>Tab Stops...
dialog: check the "Emulate tabs" checkbox, provide a decent "Emulated tab
spacing" value, and clear the "Use tab characters in padding and emulated
tabs". Then save your preferences (Preferences>Save Defaults...) for next
time.

> Can someone from the development team please consider adoption of
> these features in an update of NEdit? The diff-option is the most
> innovative thing
> in this list.
>
> Thanks!

Cheers,
Tony