JEdit - the choice of the new generation?

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.

This is probably the most feature-rich of all modern editors - new ideas are being incorporated by the day, like Folding and Narrowing. 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.

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.

Most of the plug-ins available cater to the Java programmer, and they are seamlessly integrated into the operation of the editor. This makes jEdit probably only second to (x)emacs in extensibility. 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;

Most of these plugins are easy to configure and even easier to update and install - jEdit checks and downloads the plug-ins for you... One good thing about jEdit overall is the ease of configuration of most aspects of the editor - no more arcane .vimrc or .emacs files!

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. 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.

The icing on top of the cake is of course the fact that jEdit is extremely portable, since it is written in Java. I personally use jEdit in Windows 2000 and in Solaris 8, and it works fine in both OS's.

For 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 only drawback is the long startup time, as with most Java applications.

Congratulations to the author, Slava Pestov, for a wonderful piece of code and for the on-going effort with jEdit!

Tiago Henriques

tiago_castro_henriques@yahoo.com