Building/running nedit on Intel Macbook

[Greg Edwards]

Folks,

Just reporting success at the above. Thanks to Jim Devona and Jerry
Kazdan for pointers. Config: MacBook basic, macOS 10.4.8, 2GHz Intel
Core 2 Duo.

Jim's page at  http://anoved.net/nedit.html  has all the detail, but
the key thing I missed was that you must have X11.app installed. This
isn't there by default, you need to install it from the first MacOS CD
with "Install Optional Software". That gives you
/usr/X11R6/{include,lib} which the build needs and expects to find
there. After that Jim's build and run instructions are all fine.

Apple Support sent me down a rathole by advising to install the
"xcode" suite from the CD or the Apple website. This contains gcc
(which is great) but also a tree of X11 dev stuff, including
X11/include and X11/lib buried way down in
/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/X11R6. If you adjust include and
lib pointers (-I and -L in the makefile) to build with that, you can
build but at runtime yiou get stuff like:

~/nedit-5.5/source $ ./nedit
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11R6/lib/libXp.6.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/gedwards/Downloads/Nedit-5.5/nedit- 5.5/source/./nedit
  Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap

I'm sure this is elementary MacOSUnix library handling fluff, but it
tricked me for a while.

Also, more importantly than any of the above, the binary prebuilt
download of nedit for Mac Intel just works straight up if X11.app is
installed. You need to launch it from X11.apps -> Terminal (an xterm),
and possibly do an xhost +. You can put nedit as a direct menu entry
in the X11 Applications menu bar.


Great to have nedit back again on my cool new MacBook. Intel dual-core
MacBooks are very cool, everything just works and does what you want,
like those nauseating Mac people say. Need to print ? Plug your HP
printer in and it's recognized, configured and ready instantly. No
popups about "Windows has found a new USB device, would you like to
spend 10 minutes pfaffing around, insertng CDs, blah blah". And with
Bootcamp you can swap to Windows when you need to, got the best of
everything. Triple-boot with Linux would be perfect but the web gossip
seems to say that's still pretty messy. Also Parallels is worth
looking at, Windows/Linux virtualized directly under macOS. Oops I'm
becoming a Mac bore ...

-- 
Greg Edwards
land 9487 6171
mob 0400 102 774