NE Cambridge Editor?

I was idly poking around on sdf.org when I stumbled across a text editor called “ne”. Looked through the documentation, and it claimed to run under RISC OS!

This led to 2 very frustrating hours of trying to find a RISC OS archive of it. The best I could find was the full source in a Minix ftp site.

So, once I get my ePIc sdcard, I’ll probably try to get it to compile.

Don’t hold your breath for this one… It might take a while!

Not RISC OS, but may be different to yours? http://dotat.at/random/ne.tar.gz

Also: ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/wordprocessing/unix/ne/

I’d found dotat’s version, it’s newer than the minix+riscos version but unix-only. The ones at ac.uk seem to be newer unix-only source.

Dotat’s version may make a useful reference if the DDE proves to be intolerant of early ANSI code.

One thing to watch with old ported software is that there was another OS called RISC/os (note the destinct punctuation difference to our RISC OS) which was defunct by the early 90s I think. It was a unix derivative of some sort for MIPS. I’ve seen unix code bases have mention of riscos but actually mean our favourite OS.

that there was another OS called RISC/os

This is true, but the docs for NE say:

Acorn’s RISC OS 3 operating system for the Archimedes and RISC PC ranges of computers.

Along with SunOS, OSF1, IRIX, HP-UX, Linux and MS-DOS!

I remember SunOS and H-PUX fondly, but I was just a user on those. Still use Linux and MS-DOS.

Well, it compiles… That’s half the battle, right?
I typed in a “hello world” and it saved the text file and got a good file on disk.

And I learned a bit about the complexities the DDE tries to hide, like the actual location of the library files, and VIA files.

If anyone wants to hammer on a text editor untouched by mortal hands since the early 2000’s, I can package it up… With the understanding that I’m working overtime every week and support is going to be slow.

caveat: NE seems to work fine in full-screen, but immediately sigsegv’s as a WIMP app.

I guess it has decided to teach me how to do debugging under RISC OS as well…

I’ve got those segmentation violation: Core dumped blues…

OK, so far NE has taught me about !reporter, debug flags for the compiler and linker, and basic use of !ddt.

The segfault was because it wanted a TileSprite file (and didn’t bother checking to see if the open SWI worked), but now it wants a “templates” file and I must RTFM some more…

I’m really wishing someone had the RO-specific support files for this…

After tl;dr long story I got my hands on RISC OS !NE 1.25 and stole its template file. So:

http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/ne-1.25-26bit.zip seemed ok under aemulor, no source.

http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/ne-1.31-20190530-32bit.zip NE 1.31 compiled for 32-bit RISC OS 5 on ARMv7 Pi2. Full source included.

Note that 1.31 is both missing RISC OS functionality a programmer’s editor really should have (throwback support, global clipboard) and is horribly outdated compared to UNIX NE (3.17).