Curious about next version and developer updates

[Offer Kaye]

On 5/29/07, Joachim Lous wrote:
>
> Using any other toolkit would either introduce dependencies on stuff
> not availavble
> on some platforms (where NEdit is the only good, stable graphical editor), or
> force us to bloat the distro with the entire toolkit code (which would have to
> be verified for all the platforms supported), so its no longer a
> "small, fast editor".

In other words, you've made a conscious decision to sacrifice feature
set for the sake of portability and size. Respect :)

But even though I'm no developer, I know there are existing
cross-platform toolkits (e.g. wxWidgets). I couldn't find a definitive
list of OSes where NEdit runs, except the sentence on the home page
that NEdit will run wherever "there is a working X Window environment
available". However according to the wxWidgets home page it allows you
to write code for "Win32, Mac OS X, GTK+, X11, Motif, WinCE, and more
using one codebase."
So maybe the problem is that wxWidgets simply isn't installed by
default in most places. But isn't it required just for developing the
app, not running it? I guess I'm confused... :)

>
> Dropping supported platforms would undermine NEdit's reason for being.
> For may usage scenarios, NEdit has already been surpassed on Linux in
> ways that it is unlikely to catch up with.

Only in some ways, see below.

> The core strengths these days is
> the stunning range of systems it works on (in an age where nost projects
> only target a couple of OSS OSes), the compactness, and single-file install-free
> executable. Drop any of these, and it's a large step closer to dead.

Add also:
1. Easy touse so even dumb engineers can use it :), yet coupled with
2. A powerful feature set, including middle mouse-button drag-copy,
tabs, EASY text-blocks drag-n-drop (I've never seen this implemented
as easy as in NEdit in any other editor!!),
3. An easy to learn and use macro-ing system.
4. All the things you mentioned.
5. Easily handles 500MB and larger text files, where other editors
would croak and die...

But would moving to a more modern toolkit such as wxWidgets really
force you to drop the core strengths you mentioned, such as the wide
system support and single-file install? Sorry if you see this as a
trivial question, like I said I'm not a dev so such issues are mostly
a black-box for me... :)

Cheers,
-- 
Offer Kaye