Future of NEdit?

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

nedit at irotas.net wrote:

> I've searched through the NEdit website and the mailing list archives to
> find any mention of the future of the NEdit project. I'm curious because
> it has long been my editor of choice on Linux, but hasn't been updated
> in over 3 years now.
> 
> So, what is the future of NEdit? Are there any forks out there that are
> continuing to evolve the project? Is it dead?

The project has a working mailing list and web site means its not
dead. I do however think its on life support and I'm worried that
someone will pull the plug when I am not looking :-).

The main problem with nedit as I see it is that it relies on a GUI
widget set (Motif) that is not very popular any more and for which
the two most common implementations, lesstif and OpenMotif, both
have large, different sets of bugs.

For instance, changing from the Ubuntu Fiesty release to the newer
Gutsy release meant a change from a nedit using lesstif on Feisty
to OpenMotif on Gutsy. This was supposed to have been an improvement
but I now see far more Nedit crashes in a week with OpenMotif than I 
ever saw in a year with lesstif. These crashes are in the Motif
libraries, so its not something than can be fixed by hacking on
Nedit.

The idea of porting Nedit to a new GUI toolkit is also probably a
non-starter as the GUI code is too tightly interwoven with the
editing code.

Even though I've been using Nedit for over 12 years, I am worried
that if people try nedit on say Ubuntu Gutsy they will immediately
drop it for something else which doesn't crash as much. Without
*new* users, Nedit will die.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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"If POSIX threads are a good thing, perhaps I don't want to know what
they're better than."                                   -- Rob Pike