NEdit, the Nirvana editor, is a text editor

Text editor

A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....

 and source code editor

Source code editor

A source code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs by programmers. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment ....

 for the X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

. It has an interface similar to text editors on Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Macintosh, rather than to older UNIX

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 editors like Emacs

Emacs

Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...

. It was initially developed by Mark Edel for Fermilab

Fermilab

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics...

 and released under a very restrictive licence, but today it is distributed under the less restrictive GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 (plus Motif clause ¹), and developed as an independent open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 project by a team of developers. Nedit was also distributed with the IRIX

IRIX

IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. It was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. IRIX was the first operating system to include the XFS file system.The last major version...

 operating system.

NEdit is extensible through a C-like macro language, and features automatic indentation and syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and...

 for a wide variety of computer languages. NEdit can also process tags files generated using the Unix ctags command or the Exuberant Ctags

Ctags

Ctags is a program that generates an index file of names found in source and header files of various programming languages.Depending on the language,functions,variables,class members,macros and so onmay be indexed....

 program.

Its user interface is built using the Motif

Motif (widget toolkit)

In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a...

 toolkit, which made it an immediate success with a wide range of proprietary Unix platforms whose user interface use the toolkit. For a fully open source version, the alternative LessTif

LessTif

LessTif is a free software reimplementation or clone of the Motif computer programming toolkit, developed by the Hungry Programmers.As opposed to Motif, which is distributed under a proprietary license that can require the payment of royalties, LessTif is distributed under the GNU Lesser General...

 library can be used instead.

See also

• List of text editors
• Comparison of text editors
  Comparison of text editors
  This article provides basic comparisons for common text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the Category of text editor features and from the individual products' articles...
  
  
• List of Unix programs

External links

• NEdit - The multi-purpose X Window System editor - Used to be the official site, now used for other purposes
• Alternate Niki website - Dead link
• Users' mailing list
• Developers' mailing list