As an occasional NEdit developer, I'm happy to hear there are a few other OS X users out there who like it. Alt actually worked fine for me under 10.3, but I think I might have had to do some xmodmap trickery to make it so.

A better way to accomplish what you're trying to do might be to just disable the 'L' mnemonic for the Shell menu. To see if that works, try this:

nedit -xrm 'nedit*menuBar.shellMenu.mnemonic:'

You'll notice the l in the Shell menu's label is no longer underlined and Alt-L no longer drops down the menu. To make it permanent, put this line in your ~/.Xdefaults file:

nedit*menuBar.shellMenu.mnemonic:

I don't know if this is all you need to regain access to the @, but if it is then it has the advantage of not changing any of your other accelerators or mnemonics. Personally, if I couldn't use Alt-P,L to get to the Language Mode submenu I would be pretty annoyed.

Thanks for the hint. It does work perfect locally, so it's definitely the preferable solution if you do use nedit only on the Mac. (In fact I was looking for a solution like that in the beginning, but unfortunately at nedit.org only accelerator keys are mentioned, no 'mnemonics' there, or at least I couldn't find them ;-)

I do, however, also use nedit from some of our unix servers via X and then I'm stuck with the same problem. I also can't (don't want to) change the .Xdefaults on the unix boxes as the account there is used by more than one person. And you don't really lose the functionality of the accelerator keys, you just have to use the 'command' key instead of 'alt'...