One thing NEdit has going for it is its speed when working with very large files on the order of a GB. Out of GUI editors it seemed to handle such files the best. Used it a lot as a chip designer at Synopsys, the large files in question being RCc extraction netlists. Granted it was kinda buggy, but most of us stuck with it.

My preferred text editor going back to the IRIX days of nedit.

This is trying to fill the gap between console Unicode editors (e.g mined) and the 'full-fat' editors typically built around GTK or Qt. I'm not too keen they decided to mess around with the Motif File selection dialog to make it more 'Nautilus-like'.

Is the original version available without antialiased text and Unicode? Both are features I specifically do not want.

(However, the X locale features are not made very well; they could have been done better (for example, it should not require the C library locale to match the X windows locale, but it does, which can cause some locales to not work, as well as other problems; there is also the bug in Xlib (and problems with the distribution) that requires it to be compiled differently for some locales than other locales).)

I still use NEdit the same way I use notepad on Windows. Quick work on small ASCII-only files.