jEdit – Text Editor for Power Users

jEdit is a text editor written in JAVA (ok, how many of you have I scared away with that?) that is mainly focused at developers due to it’s syntax highlighting and many other features. I would say that I would only be half as productive if I didn’t use jEdit due to the many ways of customising the program to suit my needs.

Before I show you how I use jEdit for all my text editing, I’d just like to ensure you go and download it from jEdit.org. I must say, though, I am always using the absolute latest version, which is not always the stable version.

Anyway, here are the main file types that jEdit helps me edit:

• PHP
• xml
• Java
• JavaScript
• html
• Shell Scripting
• and a whole list of other Application-speicific files (Ariba Buyer config files, like AML, AQL, etc…)

Why is this program so good? Well, it has a whole list of features, and, if the features aren’t built in, it has a Plugin system that can extend the program. Of course, it also has Syntax Highlighting, and, in the image on the left you can see an example of this in use. It also uses BeanShell to enable scripting and macro writing. What more could a programmer, developer, designer, configurator, computer user want?

Here is an excerpt from the site:

* Written in Java, so it runs on Mac OS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows.
* Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Dozens of macros and plugins available.
* Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the “plugin manager” feature.
* Auto indent, and syntax highlighting for more than 130 languages.
* Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode.
* Folding for selectively hiding regions of text.
* Word wrap.
* Highly configurable and customizable.
* Every other feature, both basic and advanced, you would expect to find in a text editor. See the Features page for a full list.