A handy little programming tool. (Nedit)

Member Name: RussellC

Product:	Nedit
Date:	17/08/00 (61 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Syntax highlighting, powerful search tools.

Disadvantages: Occasionally crashes.

Programming in languages like Perl on Linux everyday means that the choice of text editor is very important to me. I use vi a fair amount, especially for quick alterations to code, but it's not exactly intuitive or user friendly. So as soon as I'm working on a bigger project I switch to Nedit a friendly GUI editor that runs under X windows and has some nice features for those of us who code.

For anyone familiar with Textpad on Windows machines nedit will probably seem familiar, it offers a similar level of features, though their layout is different. For me the most important feature of Nedit is the range of options I can use to control the appearance of the editor. Syntax highlight is a great help, it's so much easier to deal with Perl when you can scan the syntax. Other languages are in their too, though I'd like to see PHP introduced soon. It also does HTML syntax highlighting making it handy for putting together web pages quickly.

All the standard text editor tools are provided, of particular note is its search and replace facilities which are surprisingly powerful. Regular expression support is provided giving a very effective way of scanning through text. The only problem I ever have with it is it doesn't quite provide the full set of features that Perl's regular expressions do, but that's just being picky. The ability to fire off the text into external processes, for example a spell checker is useful (less so for programming, but when writing a review here it can be useful).

The program is available freely on the web at www.nedit.org so it's hard to complain about somthing that's free. I installed it using the RPMs onto a Redhat box and for the most part have had no trouble with it. I do suffer from an occasional bug when a lot of windows are opened, killing one of the older windows can leave others hanging, but I've learnt to be careful around this one. All in all a well built and useful pro
gramming tool, I've not foudn a Linux GUI text editor I prefer to this one.

Summary: