NEdit

Here is something new. Not vi, not emacs, not just a wrapper for some hackneyed old Motif widget. With a sparse but sufficient keyboard command set and full regular expression substitutions, NEdit has the best mouse integration I've seen yet in a Linux editor, free or otherwise.

Weighing in at a little over a megabyte for the static-linked Motif binary, NEdit starts up slower than the last editor I wrote about, xvile, but much faster than emacs or xemacs. Scrolling is fast, and command execution shows no perceptible delay.

It's easy to learn, economical on keystrokes due to its excellent mouse support, and not too difficult to customize using X resources; featuring multiple undo/redo, NEdit earns very high marks from me.

NEdit handles both rectangular and linear regions selected by the mouse. With rectangular regions, you can:

No command or function keys are used for any of these—just mouse clicks, drags, and CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT chording. Many other operations are available via command keys, mostly CTRL- or ALT- modified, including:

Unlike some other editors, rectangular regions are not bound on the right by the shortest line in the region. Likewise, when you move a rectangular region, you can move it as far to the right as you like.

Most things you can do with rectangular regions also work with linear regions, which start some place in a line and incorporate all intervening text until some place in another line. In fact, you can convert between linear and rectangular regions while working with them, just by pressing or releasing the CTRL button.

Linear selection is supported by an xterm, so you may paste text such as command line dialogues, listings of files, and so on, from an xterm directly into a NEdit window. This saves me a great deal of time when filing bug reports and writing release notes.

Motif secondary selection is present also, in both linear and rectangular flavors. This provides some very nice features.

Dragging mouse Button 2 or Button 3 (depending on your flavor of Motif) underlines text; when you release, the underlined text is moved or copied to the location of the I-beam cursor. The position of the SHIFT key chooses move or copy.

If there is a primary selection at this time, the secondary selection replaces it or, if you hold ALT when you release the selection mouse button, it is exchanged with the primary selection. The varieties of secondary selection are great for moving sentences around in a paragraph, re-ordering the clauses of a C language switch statement, or inserting text from one editor window to another.

These mouse-based capabilities alone save me perhaps 80% of the keystrokes I'd use in vi for similar text manipulation tasks.

As is customary under Motif, if you select some text, then begin typing, the typed entry replaces the selected text. This provides the handiest way to delete blocks of selected text, using the backspace key.

Mark Edel writes: