ne

A really nice text editor for the BeOS command line

What is it?

I love Eddie when I'm working in the BeOS GUI. But if you're telnetted in, or you share time between Unix and Be, you probably want to have one good editor you share between them both.

I absolutely hate vi. I absolutely hate emacs. If you're like me, you've probably been making do with pico, an editor that was originally written for the pine mailer. pico is very simple, has no search and replace, and hasn't the faintest clue about C syntax.

pico really got me mad one day, so I went on a search for better editors. The best one I found is included here, called ne for "nice editor". It will take you about an hour to get used to. The keys and menus are reprogrammable.

Installation

  1. Put ne into /boot/home/config/bin/
  2. Note and trash the COPYING file with the GPL in it.
  3. Put the docs somewhere safe in case you want to fix up your configuration later.

Documentation

All the documentation you need to get going is this: press ESC to get to the menu.

The rest of the documentation is available (in a number of formats) in the doc directory.

Credit

Stephen van Egmond did the BeOS port. I did it by adding -I/boot/home/config/include -L/boot/home/config/lib to the makefile.

ne is written by Sebastiano Vigna and Todd Lewis. Sebastiano's page is available if you want it.