Nedit, Utilities, GUI based multi-platform editor

Introduction


The distribution from this server is enriched compared to the original
one at the Nedit WWW Server. Added parts either to be found separatly
on this server or created/modified by me are: 

 * Third pass on a pattern for DCL (this is still in an Alpha stage, no
   pun intended). 
 * Converted Unix man-pages to OpenVMS help files. 
 * Descrip.mms and example DCL for integration with VUE.  
 * Additonal icons 

Installation

The normal source distribution contains a number of DCL procedures,
which can be used to build Nedit on OpenVMS. Assuming one is located in
the top-level directory of Nedit the build requires in this case to
execute the following commands: 

$ set def [.util]
$ @comutil
$ set def [-.source]
$ @comnedit

In case MMS/MMK is installed it is sufficient to just execute this in
the top-level directory. 


Customization


The actual operations of Nedit/nc can be influenced by a number of
files located in the home directory of the user. These are: 

.neditdb 
This file contains a list of the 30 files edited most recently with
nedit. These will be presented for selection in the menu item File ->
Open Previous 

.nedit 
This file contains (almost) all of the setting customizing the
behaviour of Nedit. It has the format of an Xresource file. 

X resources


There is one additonal Xresource which you might want to set, but is
not in the .nedit file. 

nc.autoStart: <false|true> 
If the default setting false is in effect, nc will request a
confirmation before starting a new Nedit server in case there is not
yet one executing. Since at least I tend to answer Yes to this question
in 99.9999% of all cases, setting it to true saves me some work. 

Installing DCL pattern


To install the experimental DCL syntax highlighting pattern for Nedit
execute the following command: 

nedit -import dcl.pats


If you got the Zip achive from this server dcl.pats is located in the
main directory of Nedit. Once the Nedit window pops up use
"Preferences-->Save Defaults..." to commit the pattern to your personal
.nedit file. After this the DCL pattern will be available everytime you
start Nedit without further need for import statements. 


As noted earlier this pattern is an early release, i.e. it contains
only a limited number of rules. These are: 

Comments 
  Comments in DCL do start with an exclamation mark. They will be
  displayed in light gray italic. 
Keywords 
  A start of a list of kewords (verbs) in DCL has been added to the
  pattern. Currently this is still pretty short but most probably will
  grow considerably with the next release of the pattern. Keywords are
  displayed in black bold. 
Labels 
  Labels used as targets for GOTO statements will be displayed in red italic. 
Strings 
  Strings in DCL are enclosed in double quotation marks. They will be
  displayed in darkGreen. 
Qualifiers 
  Qualifiers to DCL commands (and programs using a DCL conformant command
  line interface) are displayed in brown. 

To illustrate this, there is a screenshot of Nedit while working on a
(silly) DCL procedure in this directory named nedit.png.  


All this assumes that you have not changed the standard highlight
styles of Nedit, but if you have, you most probably do not need this
explanation anyhow ;-) 

The latest version of the OpenVMS port of Nedit should always be 
accessible via 

http://zinser.no-ip.info/vms/sw/nedit.htmlx