Welcome to ne, the nice editor.

Some of the code still needs a bit of cleanup, and more comments, but it
should be rather readable. Hopefully, you will not have to read it at all.

Documentation for ne (in the "doc" directory) is provided in the form of a
texinfo file. It can be printed as a manual using TeX and GNU's texinfo.tex
macro package, or turned into an hypertext document using GNU's makeinfo.
You will then need info, the GNU hypertext reader, in order to read it. A
ready-to-use hypertext version of the documentation is contained in the
ne.info* files (just use "info -f ne.info" in order to read it). A
PostScript file with an a4 ready-to-print version of the documentation which
uses the standard Times and Courier fonts is also included. As a last
chance, a plain ASCII version is contained in ne.doc.

If you have a POSIX compliant machine with a terminfo database, a
recompilation of ne's sources on your machine will suffice for making it
work (just cd into the "src" directory and start make). If you have a
termcap database, you should use the "termcap" target (i.e., type "make
termcap"). It uses the GNU version of termcap, whose sources are included
(no library is needed). In general, if a compilation fails you should try
the following targets: none, "noposix", "termcap" and "termcapnoposix". They
use slightly different #define's in order to overcome the slight differences
among systems. If something does not work, please feel free to e_mail me.

The "terms" directory contains the terminfo sources for a couple of common
terminals. They include a much larger number of key capabilities than
usually found. They can be compiled locally with tic in order to be able to
use additional keys (such as the keypad home key).

Compatibility problems are also discussed in the documentation. Note that
the distribution Makefile is set for the GNU compiler, but any ANSI C
compliant system should do the job. Don't be alarmed if you get a lot of
warnings. If the symbol NODEBUG is not defined during the compilation, a
number of assertions will be compiled into the program. This can be useful
for the first tests, but should be avoided in common usage.

Under SunOS you should try to use the System V compatibility features in
order to compile the terminfo version. This will overcome a series of
problems reported by several users, especially the termination of the
program in correspondence to the use of the Escape key. Moreover, this will
allow you to compile and use the rich terminal descriptions distributed with
ne. Usually all you have to do is to add to your include path, library path
and command path directories like /usr/5include, /usr/5lib and /usr/5bin
respectively: try "man svidii" for details. If you do not have an ANSI
compliant compiler and you get compilation/linking errors, usually adding
the following lines at the start of ne.h (just after the #include's) will
fix the problem:

#define memmove(a,b,c) bcopy(b,a,c)
#define realloc(a,b) ((a)?(realloc)((a),(b)):malloc(b))
int toupper(int);
int tolower(int);

Under Linux you should modify as follows the first lines of the Makefile:

CC	      = gcc -I/usr/include/ncurses

LIBS	      = -lncurses

Moreover, you should absolutely use the terminfo source provided for xterm,
since the one distributed with Linux has problems with standout (ne will
leave your terminal in standout mode).

This is my first attempt to a major software project under UN*X. Thus, even
if my past experience on other systems make me feel rather sure about the
functionality of the program, it is perfectly possible that some things
strictly related to UN*X have been done in a non-optimal way. Suggestions
about how to improve the code quality are welcome.


					seba	(vigna@dsi.unimi.it)
