Motif toolkits

At the time NEdit was written there was no choice of a graphical toolkit other than Motif. Today there are different Motif toolkits around. First the original OSF Motif that NEdit was written for. Then OpenMotif version 2.1.30, which is close to the original OSF Motif, but under a different license. Furthermore, the freely developed OpenMotif 2.2 series. Finally the LGPL'd Motif clone LessTif. Notice that you can check what Motif version your NEdit binary was built with under Help->Version.

What does it mean for you?

Not much, if you use one of the binary packages that we provide. On platforms without a standard Motif library we ship binaries that are statically linked to a known-good Motif. This issue complicates things for people who decide to build NEdit from source.

Unfortunately, the different Motif toolkits are not 100% compatible to each other. Hence the problems usually caused by using a toolkit are sort of multiplied. For developers of NEdit this means that they have to check their code not only with (different versions of) a single toolkit, but with (different versions of) somehow different toolkits. For users that run NEdit on commercial Unix systems coming with OSF Motif, everything is fine. But for all other users that run NEdit on operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, or MS Windows, experience shows that they often get an NEdit binary that doesn't work properly. In order to ease these problems a bit, NEdit.org provides pre-built binaries that are statically linked with a known-good version of OpenMotif (since this is closest to OSF Motif). Unfortunately, due to the license of OpenMotif, this is possible only for open source operating systems. For other (non-Unix) systems, a LessTif version, which is known to work stably with NEdit, is used. (But this means that there are many smaller things that don't work like they should.) Moreover, there was a toolkit checker added to the sources of NEdit, that warns you, if you are trying to compile NEdit with an incompatible or unknown Motif toolkit version.

Why is NEdit still using Motif, then?

The answer to this question is rather simple. Although there are free software toolkits (like GTK or QT) available for some years now, porting NEdit to a different toolkit will be much work - and a difficult task, too. There is nobody there so far that seems to have the time, or to have the wish, to do this work. Well, if so, why not switching to LessTif, that is LGPL'd and hence can be used anywhere? Actually, when NEdit was released under GPL some five years ago, it used LessTif on Linux. Although the quality of LessTif has improved considerably since that time, it is still rather beta quality. Even worse, regrettably LessTif has not the support it would need to change this. (One reason may be that it is not satisfying enough to create only a clone, especially if you feel that the program that you are cloning is somehow wrong and should be different/better.) OK, why then not using OpenMotif? Well, text editors should be cross-platform, shouldn't they? Using OpenMotif would mean restricting the use of NEdit to a minority of operating systems ...