Though general in appearance, NEdit has many features intended specifically for programmers. Major programming-related topics are listed in separate sections under the heading: "Features for Programming": Syntax Highlighting, Tabs and Tab Emulation, ctags support, and Automatic Indent. Minor topics related to programming are discussed below:
Language Modes
When nedit initially reads a file, it attempts to determine whether the file is in one of the computer languages that it knows about. Knowing what language a file is written in allows NEdit to assign highlight patterns and smart indent macros, and to set language specific preferences like word delimiters, tab emulation, and auto-indent. Language mode can be recognized from both the file name and from the first 200 characters of content. Language mode recognition and language-specific preferences are configured in: Preferences -> Default Settings -> Language Modes....
You can set the language mode manually for a window, by selecting it from the menu: Preferences -> Language Modes.Line Numbers
To find a particular line in a source file by line number, choose Goto Line #... from the Search menu. You can also directly select the line number text in the compiler message in the terminal emulator window (xterm, decterm, winterm, etc.) where you ran the compiler, and choose Goto Selected from the Search menu.
To find out the line number of a particular line in your file, turn on Statistics Line in the Preferences menu and position the insertion point anywhere on the line. The statistics line continuously updates the line number of the line containing the cursor.Matching Parentheses
To help you inspect nested parentheses, brackets, braces, quotes, and other characters, NEdit has both an automatic parenthesis matching mode, and a Find Matching command. Automatic parenthesis matching is activated when you type, or move the insertion cursor after a parenthesis, bracket, or brace. It momentarily highlights the matching character if that character is visible in the window. To find a matching character anywhere in the file, select it or position the cursor after it, and choose Find Matching from the Search menu. If the character matches itself, such as a quote or slash, select the first character of the pair. NEdit will match {, (, [, <, ", ', `, /, and \.
Opening Included Files
The Open Selected command in the File menu understands the C preprocessor's #include syntax, so selecting an #include line and invoking Open Selected will generally find the file referred to, unless doing so depends on the settings of compiler switches or other information not available to NEdit.
Interface to Programming Tools
There are also some simple compile/review, grep, ctree, and ctags browsers available in the NEdit contrib directory on ftp.fnal.gov.Integrated software development environments such as SGI's CaseVision and Centerline Software's Code Center, can be interfaced directly with NEdit via the client server interface. These tools allow you to click directly on compiler and runtime error messages and request NEdit to open files, and select lines of interest. The easiest method is usually to use the tool's interface for character-based editors like vi, to invoke nc, but programatic interfaces can also be derived using the source code for nc.
Changing the Tab Distance
Tabs are important for programming in languages which use indentation to show nesting, as short-hand for producing white-space for leading indents. As a programmer, you have to decide how to use indentation, and how or whether tab characters map to your indentation scheme.
Ideally, tab characters map directly to the amount of indent that you use to distinguish nesting levels in your code. Unfortunately, the Unix standard for interpretation of tab characters is eight characters (probably dating back to mechanical capabilities of the original teletype), which is usually too coarse for a single indent.
Most text editors, NEdit included, allow you to change the interpretation of the tab character, and many programmers take advantage of this, and set their tabs to 3 or 4 characters to match their programming style. In NEdit you set the hardware tab distance in Preferences -> Tabs... for the current window, or Preferences -> Default Settings -> Tabs... (general), or Preferences -> Default Settings -> Language Modes... (language-specific) to change the defaults for future windows.
Changing the meaning of the tab character makes programming much easier while you're in the editor, but can cause you headaches outside of the editor, because there is no way to pass along the tab setting as part of a plain-text file. All of the other tools which display, print, and otherwise process your source code have to be made aware of how the tabs are set, and must be able to handle the change. Non-standard tabs can also confuse other programmers, or make editing your code difficult for them if their text editors don't support changes in tab distance.Emulated Tabs
An alternative to changing the interpretation of the tab character is tab emulation. In the Tabs... dialog(s), turning on Emulated Tabs causes the Tab key to insert the correct number of spaces and/or tabs to bring the cursor the next emulated tab stop, as if tabs were set at the emulated tab distance rather than the hardware tab distance. Backspacing immediately after entering an emulated tab will delete the fictitious tab as a unit, but as soon as you move the cursor away from the spot, NEdit will forget that the collection of spaces and tabs is a tab, and will treat it as separate characters. To enter a real tab character with "Emulate Tabs" turned on, use Ctrl+Tab.
It is also possible to tell NEdit not to insert ANY tab characters at all in the course of processing emulated tabs, and in shifting and rectangular insertion/deletion operations, for programmers who worry about the misinterpretation of tab characters on other systems.
The Tabs dialog controls both the operation of the Tab key, and the interpretation of tab characters within a file.
The first field, Tab Spacing, controls how NEdit responds to tab characters in a file. On most Unix and VMS systems the conventional interpretation of a tab character is to advance the text position to the nearest multiple of eight characters (a tab spacing of 8). However, many programmers of C and other structured languages, when given the choice, prefer a tab spacing of 3 or 4 characters. Setting a three or four character hardware tab spacing is useful and convenient as long as your other software tools support it. Unfortunately, on Unix and VMS systems, system utilities, such as more, and printing software can't always properly display files with other than eight character tabs.
Selecting "Emulate Tabs" will cause the Tab key to insert the correct number of spaces or tabs to reach the next tab stop, as if the tab spacing were set at the value in the "Emulated tab spacing" field. Backspacing immediately after entering an emulated tab will delete it as a unit, but as soon as you move the cursor away from the spot, NEdit will forget that the collection of spaces and tabs is a tab, and will treat it as separate characters. To enter a real tab character with "Emulate Tabs" turned on, use Ctrl+Tab.
In generating emulated tabs, and in Shift Left, Paste Column, and some rectangular selection operations, NEdit inserts blank characters (spaces or tabs) to preserve the alignment of non-blank characters. The bottom toggle button in the Tabs dialog instructs NEdit whether to insert tab characters as padding in such situations. Turning this off, will keep NEdit from automatically inserting tabs. Some software developers prefer to keep their source code free of tabs to avoid its misinterpretation on systems with different tab character conventions.
Programmers who use structured languages usually require some form of automatic indent, so that they don't have to continually re-type the sequences of tabs and/or spaces needed to maintain lengthy running indents. Version 5.0 of NEdit is the first release of NEdit to offer "smart" indent, at least experimentally, in addition to the traditional automatic indent which simply lines up the cursor position with the previous line.
Smart Indent
Smart Indent in this release must still be considered somewhat experimental. Smart indent macros are only available by default for C and C++, and while these can easily be configured for different default indentation distances, they may not conform to everyone's exact C programming style. Smart indent is programmed in terms of macros in the NEdit macro language which can be entered in: Preferences -> Default Settings -> Indent -> Program Smart Indent. Hooks are provided for intervening at the point that a newline is entered, either via the user pressing the Enter key, or through auto-wrapping; and for arbitrary type-in to act on specific characters typed.
To type a newline character without invoking smart-indent when operating in smart-indent mode, hold the Ctrl key while pressing the Return or Enter key.Auto-Indent
With Indent set to Auto (the default), NEdit keeps a running indent. When you press the Return or Enter key, spaces and tabs are inserted to line up the insert point under the start of the previous line. Ctrl+Return in auto-indent mode acts like a normal return, With auto-indent turned off, Ctrl+Return does indentation.
Block Indentation Adjustment
The Shift Left and Shift Right commands as well as rectangular dragging can be used to adjust the indentation for several lines at once. To shift a block of text one character to the right, select the text, then choose Shift Right from the Edit menu. Note that the accelerator keys for these menu items are Ctrl+9 and Ctrl+0, which correspond to the right and left parenthesis on most keyboards. Remember them as adjusting the text in the direction pointed to by the parenthesis character. Holding the Shift key while selecting either Shift Left or Shift Right will shift the text by one tab stop (or by one emulated tab stop if tab emulation is turned on). The help section "Shifting and Filling" under "Basic Operation" has details.
Syntax Highlighting means using colors and fonts to help distinguish language elements in programming languages and other types of structured files. Programmers use syntax highlighting to understand code faster and better, and to spot many kinds of syntax errors more quickly.
To use syntax highlighting in NEdit, select Highlight Syntax in the Preferences menu. If NEdit recognizes the computer language that you are using, and highlighting rules (patterns) are available for that language, it will highlight your text, and maintain the highlighting, automatically, as you type.
If NEdit doesn't correctly recognize the type of the file you are editing, you can manually select a language mode from Language Modes in the Preferences menu. You can also program the method that NEdit uses to recognize language modes in Preferences -> Default Settings -> Language Modes....
If no highlighting patterns are available for the language that you want to use, you can create new patterns relatively quickly. The Help section "Highlighting Patterns" under "Customizing", has details.
If you are satisfied with what NEdit is highlighting, but would like it to use different colors or fonts, you can change these by selecting Preferences -> Default Settings -> Syntax Highlighting -> Text Drawing Styles. Highlighting patterns are connected with font and color information through a common set of styles so that colorings defined for one language will be similar across others, and patterns within the same language which are meant to appear identical can be changed in the same place. To understand which styles are used to highlight the language you are interested in, you may need to look at "Patterns for Highlighting" section, as well.
Syntax highlighting is CPU intensive, and under some circumstances can affect NEdit's responsiveness. If you have a particularly slow system, or work with very large files, you may not want to use it all of the time. Syntax highlighting introduces two kinds of delays. The first is an initial parsing delay, proportional to the size of the file. This delay is also incurred when pasting large sections of text, filtering text through shell commands, and other circumstances involving changes to large amounts of text. The second kind of delay happens when text which has not previously been visible is scrolled in to view. Depending on your system, and the highlight patterns you are using, this may or may not be noticeable. A typing delay is also possible, but unlikely if you are only using the built-in patterns.
NEdit can process tags files generated using the Unix ctags command. Ctags creates index files correlating names of functions and declarations with their locations in C, Fortran, or Pascal source code files. (See the ctags manual page for more information). Ctags produces a file called "tags" which can be loaded by NEdit. Once loaded, the information in the tags file enables NEdit to go directly to the declaration of a highlighted function or data structure name with a single command. To load a tags file, select "Load Tags File" from the File menu and choose a tags file to load, or specify the name of the tags file on the NEdit command line:
- nedit -tags tags
NEdit can also be set to load a tags file automatically when it starts up. Setting the X resource nedit.tagFile to the name of a tag file tells NEdit to look for that file at startup time (see Customizing NEdit). The file name can be either a complete path name, in which case NEdit will always load the same tags file, or a file name without a path or with a relative path, in which case NEdit will load it starting from the current directory. The second option allows you to have different tags files for different projects, each automatically loaded depending on the directory you're in when you start NEdit. Setting the name to "tags" is an obvious choice since this is the name that ctags uses.
To find the definition of a function or data structure once a tags file is loaded, select the name anywhere it appears in your program (see Selecting Text) and choose "Find Definition" from the Search menu.
Send questions and comments to: nedit_support@fnal.gov.