Welcome to ne, the nice editor.
Documentation (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 a hypertext document using texi2html or GNU's makeinfo. The directory contains several pre-compiled printable and hypertext version of the documentation.
The "terms" directory contains the terminfo sources for a couple of common terminals, in case your own database has problems. They can be compiled locally with tic.
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 specify "NE_TERMCAP=1" (i.e., type "make NE_TERMCAP=1"). 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 options: none, "NE_NOPOSIX=1", "NE_TERMCAP=1" and then both of them. They use slightly different #define's to overcome the slight differences among systems. If you have problem with the local compiler and have the GNU compiler installed, try "CC=gcc", and possibly also "OPTS=-ansi".
If you are compiling under Cygwin or similar emulations of UN*X running under other operating systems, you can specify "NE_ANSI=1" to build a copy of ne that will use by default built-in ANSI terminal control sequences. You can always override this choice with a command line option, however.
ne can handle UTF-8, and supports multiple-column characters. The latter requires some support from the system: you can disable wide-character, multiple-column support with "NE_NOWCHAR=1".
If something does not work, please feel free to e-mail us.
Compatibility problems are also discussed in the documentation. 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.
seba (vigna@dsi.unimi.it)
Todd (Todd_Lewis@unc.edu)