nedkit

XNEdit macros for the NED team at IPAC. Reshaping a data file by hand is slow and easy to get subtly wrong, and a macro does the same edit the same way every time. Python utilities live here too, for the jobs too big to run inside the editor.

The commands

Align Columns

For columns that do not line up.

Joins fields with | and pads each column to its widest value. Run it first to fix the field boundaries, then again once the file is finished.

Normalize Characters

For characters that look like ASCII and are not.

Rewrites the dashes, quotes and ligatures a PDF brings with it, and reports whatever it could not safely translate.

Trim Trailing Blanks

For invisible whitespace at the ends of lines.

Removes trailing spaces and tabs, and leaves the buffer alone when there is nothing to remove.

Just pasted a table out of a paper and want to know what to run? Cleaning up a pasted table walks through both commands on a real file. To get them installed in the first place, start with getting started.

The editor is XNEdit, not NEdit

nedkit targets XNEdit, the Motif fork of NEdit 5.7. It keeps its configuration in ~/.xnedit/, where classic NEdit uses ~/.nedit/. The two share a macro language and a settings format, so NEdit settings transfer apart from font configuration, but the directories are separate. When a macro misbehaves, check which editor is actually running before debugging the macro.

XNEdit runs locally on the Macs under XQuartz rather than being forwarded from a Linux host, which explains some behavior that otherwise looks like a bug: the menu bar sits inside the window, copy and paste go through the X selection rather than the macOS clipboard, and t_print() output lands in the terminal that launched xnedit.