Motif

[Joerg Fischer]

> How tight is the dependency on Motif in nedit, btw? Would it be
> possible to restructure nedit to work with another toolkit, without
> killing it's leanness and speed?

You aren't the first one thinking about switching the toolkit. Unfortunately,
for the pending 5.6 release there is nobody who kicks it out the door.
So, migrating, or rather completely rewriting, nedit to another toolkit
just needs some volunteers. The code is in CVS.

> I have to think of the dillo browser project... it was dead for some
> time and has been resurrected recently, replacing the gtk1 toolkit with
> fltk.

I also thought about fltk since it uses already parts of nedit's 
text editing widget. Moreover, fltk is small and fast. However, looking
at the short cuts handling or block selections for example shows that
an editor rewritten with fltk won't have too much in common with the 
Motif/Xt nedit. fltk is simple, and this is at the same time its up- and 
downside.

> Seemed to be manageable

A browser isn't an editor even if it should be a bit more complex
than dillo.

This reminds me of vim and emacs. These editors are console editors.
There are versions of them with some X toolkit linked in, but this
doesn't change much IMO. (Ok, one can display pictures in the editing
buffer of emacs' X version, but the handling isn't different.)
Basically, for these editors the purpose for using X is to have some
more pixels.

Now sometimes folks come around here and wonder why nedit can't simply
switch the toolkit like vim or emacs can. The answer is probably 
something like "because there is no console version of nedit".

> I see the petition to make CDE/Motif free... and I wonder how much it would
> matter if it succeeds. Would Motif reclaim the world?

My point is even me isn't too much interested in learning technologies
if they aren't free. (Where "even" means, I'm interested in nedit
development, and if one likes to do this right, some knowledge of
Motif is required.)

I don't care about "modern" (or to quote Otto Rehagel: modern is what wins).
The reason why gtk was developed wasn't because it is better technologically
speaking or more modern whatever this means (perhaps newer?). It was
because Motif wasn't and still isn't free. (Moreover, there are surely
different views of how a toolkit should be, as the collection of
available free toolkits shows.) Free software needn't be better than
proprietary stuff - that's more a matter of who created the programs.

It's just not inviting to live with the restrictions of proprietary 
software. Obviously, even Sun seems to realize this when they drop
their own proprietary stuff from their proprietary Solaris in favour
of free software. The paradox is that they weren't helpful with
the petition to free CDE and Motif, although I believe they could be...

But I rather like to answer some real question: Personally I use
a lesstif checkout with the version number 0.93.95. However this
isn't the released lesstif version with this number, but was
grabbed from CVS a few days or so before the "official" release.

Now you may wonder how the official release could be different
if there were only a few days between "my" snapshot and the
release. It just was always the release policy of the lesstif
project until the end to follow a "The Cathedral & the Bazaar"
style of development, so that no release was actually stable,
which IMO was a mistake for a toolkit, where stability matters
more than to get the latest version number.

The reason why nedit sometimes worked surprisingly well with
lesstif was that a main developer of lesstif was also an nedit
developer. This doesn't hold for the later versions of lesstif,
though.

> Issue is that we at Source Mage have a rather strict policy
> to default to the stable upstream releases.

The idea is probably that these are really more stable in the
sense of the word. The example of lesstif shows how wrong one
can be with this. The example in the other direction is this
5.6 [Under Development] thing. It surely wasn't much further
developed for moons. It mainly contains fixes, and I wonder
how 5.5 still runs on Linux systems, where so much changed
in the mean time. Actually, the sources you got is the
stable nedit by now. Don't be fooled by the wording in
the version info. You may easily change this to not frighten
the naive users;-)

[Seriously, I run a patched (for extra features) version of 
these sources stably since probably years, and I presume
I'm not the only one doing so...]

Now i've written even more than you for what it's worth.

--Jörg