![]() ![]() This is a free, powerful and extensible text editor through plugins that will provide us with a large number of functionalities. It's a wonderful tool, and it's free.In the next article we are going to take a look at jEdit. Speed, functionality, and memory usage are all being improved. The section for downloading Jedit plugins is in the top ten most popular Sourceforge download sites list. I have never had trouble getting to the site: If you look at the Sourceforge statistics on the project, you can see that it's under very active development. The principal author responds to messages posted on the site very quickly. The documentation on the site is good, and the help system is much improved in the new version, which is in final beta now (02-26-03). The implementation is quite powerful, and the program is very popular. May have some potential, but the implementation is poor, documentation is mediocre, support is non existant, and getting to the website will take more of your time than it's worth." "Unless you really, really want a text editor programmed in Java, stay away from this open source project. The only drawback is the long startup time, as with most Java applications.Ĭongratulations to the author, Slava Pestov, for a wonderful piece of code and for the on-going effort with jEdit! I personally use jEdit in Windows 2000 and in Solaris 8, and it works fine in both OS's.įor the Java-skeptics, I have to add that the editor, although completely GUI based, is very responsive overall, so speed is not an issue. The icing on top of the cake is of course the fact that jEdit is extremely portable, since it is written in Java. It's shame the author didn't choose a more standard scripting language, such as Python (or Jython, its Java variant), but given the bias of the editor towards Java this is understandable. It's also possible to define macros, and the editor is programmable using a relatively new scripting language called Beanshell, which has almost identical syntax to Java. One good thing about jEdit overall is the ease of configuration of most aspects of the editor - no more arcane. Most of these plugins are easy to configure and even easier to update and install - jEdit checks and downloads the plug-ins for you. Some of the best plug-ins are JBrowse, which shows you the content of your classes in a kind of UML tree diagram Java Style, which reformats your java program according to the style rules chosen by you JStandards, which checks conformance to a series of coding standards JCompiler, which allows group compilation of java files ![]() This makes jEdit probably only second to (x)emacs in extensibility. Most of the plug-ins available cater to the Java programmer, and they are seamlessly integrated into the operation of the editor. While the basic editor is by itself extremely modern, good-looking and powerful, where jEdit really shines out is in the power of its Plug-in architecture. However, all these features do not get in the way of your progressive learning, which is a major problem with vi, and particularly vim and (x)emacs, which offer so much functionality that it is difficult not to be overwhelmed when you start using them. This is probably the most feature-rich of all modern editors - new ideas are being incorporated by the day, like Folding and Narrowing. Having grown up on vi(m) and (x)emacs, the 2 war-horses of unix programmers and sysadmins, what is amazing about jEdit is that it offers the same kind of power without the slow learning curve of these 2 classic editors. ![]() JEdit - the choice of the new generation? ![]()
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