Welcome to the NLED Homepage

created and maintained by Evan Weaver

NLED, the Neat Little EDitor, is a text-mode, full-screen programmer's editor that I wrote for the IBM PC back in the eighties before MSDOS had an EDIT command. (Yes, I am one of many who have been mowed down by the Microsoft juggernaut). I have since ported it to AIX, Linux and Windows, along with a smattering of other operating systems - just about every environment with a C compiler on which I've worked lately.

I have given up hope of making any money off of it, but I use it for everything myself (including writing this web page). Try it...you might like it. It is more than just another editor, it is a way of life! (Hey, I yearn for simplicity).

Seriously, NLED combines simplicity of use with those features that are essential to a programmer. A few minutes is all it takes to master it, yet it has the cut&paste, search&replace and importation capabilities needed for most programming tasks. One relatively unique feature is NLED's ability to read and write binary files as easily as text files; a knowledgeable person can use NLED to patch an executable program or a database file, for example.

Note that NLED is an open source product (licensed under the GNU General Public License), which works for me but for which there is NO WARRANTY of any kind. If you don't like it, you can fix it to your liking, although if you distribute your improved version, you are also obligated to distribute your improved source code. (I ask, but don't require, that you call your improved version something other than NLED, such as NLED2 or NBED - Neat Big EDitor? - so that people don't get confused between my program and yours).

The current version is 2.52.

Here is the source code, available one of three ways:

And here are a number of precompiled versions of NLED. (You might need to right click and "Save Target As..." for some of these to download them). Note that many of them call themselves NLED 2.51: the only NLED version that changed moving from 2.51 to 2.52 was the Windows version, so effectively these are all version 2.52.

No installation is required - just ensure that the NLED executable is somewhere on your search path (and, on Linux/Unix systems, that it has execute permission). While NLED is very easy to figure out (just press the Escape key to do something other than edit) you might want to read the user documentation.

Finally, if you are running an old machine with MS-DOS, and want the old, old 16-bit version of NLED, here it is (version 2.3).