nedit apparently needs the csh for all external programs it executes, but no csh is listed as a dependency for nedit. Emerging tcsh afterwards here fixed it, so i guess it's only the dependency thats the problem.
you can add: nedit.shell: /bin/bash into you ~/.nedit file but I will make bash the default in the ebuild. Note to self: change ispell to aspell as well
-r2 now relies on /bin/sh instead of /bin/csh and it uses aspell instead of ispell for spell checking