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configuration

NEdit can be configured at several levels. At the lowest level is the general appearance, such as the font face in the menus, the background color of the help text, or the weight of the cursor. These are configured through X resources. With a few tricks, NEdit can be nicely integrated into environments such as Gnome or KDE. The X resources are also used for a number of properties that are more related to the operation of the program, such as the shell that should be used to execute external commands, or the number of file names to remember that have been opened recently.

Aside from this, much of NEdit's functionality can be configured from within the application. This is what the `Preferences' menu is for, which basically consists of two parts. All options that are available directly under this menu affect only the window from which the menu was accessed, and they will be lost when the window is closed. Persistent configuration is done from the `Default Settings' submenu within the `Preferences' menu. Changes that are made here can be stored, and will be placed in the file $HOME/.nedit. In this submenu features can be modified like syntax highlighting (see Figure 3.), the configuration of the menu available under the right mouse button, and numerous other options.

Figure 3. The dialog for creating and modifying syntax highlighting patterns.

For specific instances of NEdit it is also possible to adjust the behaviour through command line options. For example, this way NEdit can be told to open a file in a window smaller than usual, and jump straight to a specified line number. Most command line options are particularly useful when NEdit is called from within another application. An exception is the `-import' option, which makes it possible to import parts of an NEdit configuration file into the existing configuration. For example, this is used to add a pattern set, or a collection of macros complete with menu bindings. This way sophisticated extensions can be offered to users, without a complex and error sensitive method of configuration.

extensions

Because NEdit is designed as a UNIX editor, it is necessary to be able to call external utilities for any function related to editing. To this end several facilities are provided. Firstly, it is possible to modify the entire printing configuration. This could be a simple call to `lpr', but it is also possibe to call another application, such as `a2ps', or to specify alternative printing queues. For programmers a connection to ctags is built in, and NEdit also offers ClearCase support.

Except for this built-in functionality, NEdit can also execute shell commands, both directly from the `Shell' menu and through several macro functions. NEdit is distributed with a number of entries for standard UNIX commands, such as spell checking with `ispell', retrieving text statistics with `wc', sorting with `sort', numbering lines with `nl', compiling with `make', and formatting source code with `expand' and `unexpand'.

One external utility deserves special mention: `expander'. This is a text filter that enables NEdit to replace abbreviations with extented text sections. This not only works for simple words, but also for complex indented code elements. Above this, `expander' supports NEdit's concept of language modes, meaning that the expansion of `if' has different results in a window with C code than in a window with a shell script. But this is a very simplistic description. Expander offers much more, such as templates and auto-expansion, and it turns NEdit into a very powerful environment for rapid prototyping and various other methods of development. A feature on expander is available here and on the NEdit web site. Expander can be found on the NEdit ftp sites.

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