Curious about next version

[Paterline, David L.]

Hi, 

I would like to second the comment from Offer Kaye that, "... as a user, I
would also love to see new features. NEdit project last release was almost 3
years ago.". It seems that there have been a number of patches offered in
the past few years to support new/enhanced features, but it sounds like it
is not planned to incorporate these patches in the next release. 

I think most of the examples from the niki/patches
(http://ajbj.free.fr/nedit/nedit5.5dev/patches/NEditPatches.html) and Nedit
Patches (http://www.nedit.org/niki/index.php/Patches) web pages would be
useful to be included in the next release. I think there also were patches
discussed for current line highlighting, marking begin/end keywords, and
other functions.

I haven't been following the discussion list as closely in recent months, so
if I am incorrect in my conclusion, I apologize and hope that someone can
more completely describe the next planned release and/or possibly explain
why more of the existing patches won't be included.

Again, I would like to thank all the contributors who provide such a
powerful and useful editor. I hope you all realize how much your efforts are
appreciated.

Thank you.

-
David L. Paterline
Principal Engineer       
Westinghouse Electric Company
Nuclear Fuel Engineering
Engineering Computing
paterldl at westinghouse.com   
PH: 412-374-2286
FX: 412-374-2284



-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at nedit.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at nedit.org] On Behalf
Of Offer Kaye
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 10:25 AM
To: NEdit discussion list
Subject: Re: Curious about next version and developer updates


On 5/29/07, Thorsten Haude wrote:
>
> The problem is
> really that NEdit is dyed-in-the-wool Xt/Motif, and it would be a 
> major rewrite to change that. Now considering that we cannot even 
> agree on (I think) necessary maintenance work...
>

Only thing I can say is, I love NEdit for many reasons.
I love it for the fact that it's a single executable file, I love it that it
will ran on the limping-old Sun-Solaris 5.8 stations as well as the
stripped-bare Linux-without-even-GTK2-installed I use at work. If it didn't
work on them, I'd be forced to use vim and probably my head would have
exploded years ago or something :) So I wouldn't want you as devs to pick a
solution that would take NEdit away from me. Please, keep supporting the
older OSes, at least for now, if you can.

But really, as a user, I would also love to see new features. NEdit project
last release was almost 3 years ago. While I don't expect any time
commitment from a free project, what doesn't grow, will eventually wither
and die. How many people will still be using NEdit in 2, 3, 5 or 7 years
from now if it doesn't give them the features they want, compared to other
solutions? Other editors aren't standing in place, eventually they too will
have easy editing of blocks of text, superb Search-and-Replace and a great
macro system. Maybe for now NEdit is safe as the best
simplest-yet-good-for-programmers editor, but this will not be forever.

Even support of older OSes can eventually be too much a burden. Heck, at the
rate NEdit is changing, you could branch it off to OldNEdit while porting
NEdit to a better world for all. OldNEdit will still be around for the few
people who need it on really old / unsupported-by-the-new-toolkit OSes and
will not be maintained, or at least very little. Isn't this already the case
anyway, de-facto?

Probably morally wrong of me to ask other people to contribute time and
effort to a project they won't get paid for, so I volunteer to help with the
new docs, if a NEdit ever gets new life. At least I can help a little :)

I'll shut up about this now, regardless of what you decide. For now, NEdit
is still da-best!

Cheers,
-- 
Offer Kaye
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