Its user interface is built using the Motif toolkit, which made it an immediate success with a wide range of Unix platforms whose user interfaces use that toolkit.

Major development on SourceForge stopped in 2010,[4] with minor updates being made as recently as February 2017.

[5] According to the project's news page the source repository has been converted from CVS to Git in September 2014.

From 2018, development continued on GitHub in the form of XNEdit, a fork of NEdit version 5.7.

Version 1.4 offers full Unicode support, antialiased text rendering, modern Open/Save dialog and Drag&Drop of tabs.