# NEdit

7 Hacker News commenters recommended NEdit and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A long-running, simple text editor that people still use for quick notes, with sane line wrapping out of the box. The common caveat is that it did not survive the switch to UTF-8.

## Why people recommend it

- Still used for daily notes (2 comments): "I still use nedit pretty much daily whenever i want to note something down" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533907)) "Still using XNEdit at times (the version that supports UTF-8)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537884))

## What people warn about

- Did not survive UTF-8 switch (1 comments): "Sadly it didn't really survive the switch to utf-8." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49532344))
- Dated, only fine for mid-nineties (1 comments): "Can't say I miss nedit. But it was alright for the mid nineties when I used it on university workstations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49534770))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zed](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zed.md): 700 recommend
- [GNU Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/emacs.md): 648 recommend
- [Vim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vim.md): 513 recommend
- [Visual Studio Code](https://hackerapproved.com/p/visual-studio-code.md): 485 recommend
- [Neovim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neovim.md): 295 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "NEdit", https://hackerapproved.com/p/nedit/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).