Introduction (ne’s manual)

1 Introduction

ne is a full screen text editor for UN*X (or, more precisely, for POSIX: see Motivations and Design). I came to the decision to write such an editor after getting completely sick of vi, both from a feature and user interface point of view. I needed an editor that I could use through a telnet connection or a phone line and that wouldn’t fire off a full-blown LITHP¹ operating system just to do some editing.

A concise overview of the main features follows:

three user interfaces: control keystrokes, command line, and menus; keystrokes and menus are completely configurable;
syntax highlighting;
full support for UTF-8 files, including multiple-column characters;
64-bit file/line length;
simple scripting language where scripts can be generated via an idiotproof record/play method;
unlimited undo/redo capability (can be disabled with a command);
automatic preferences system based on the extension of the file name being edited or regex content matching;
automatic completion of prefixes using words in your documents as dictionary;
a file requester with completion features for easy file retrieval;
extended regular expression search and replace à la emacs and vi;
a very compact memory model—you can easily load and modify very large files, even if they do not fit your core memory;
editing of binary files.

Footnotes

(1)

This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an ‘s’ in its character set; users must substitute ‘th’. LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth.