Review: jEdit programming text editor

Apr 29, '02 12:28:12AM

Contributed by: robg

In December of 2000, I published a hint about jEdit, a multi (programming) language text editing application. It had been a long time since I used it, as I haven't done any intensive PHP coding in about that amount of time.

This weekend, I began to convert macosxhints and its customized PHP code to run on the latest version of Geeklog (the "engine" behind the site). I downloaded the newest version of jEdit from the project's home page, and was very impressed with what I saw. Enough so that I made jEdit the pick of the week for this week.

Read the rest of the article for a mini-review of jEdit...

My project involved working on multitudes of separate PHP and HTML files, and jEdit made the task somewhat easier (although it was still quite a challenge!). There are a number of features that I, as a "non-programmer" programmer, found quite useful:

The downsides? From my seat, about the only thing I noticed is that it's a bit slow at scrolling a line at a time. jEdit is also a Java application, so it doesn't have the full Aqua interface. I know there are those who swear by BBedit, and I do use the Lite version occasionally, but for my semi-occasional programming needs, jEdit more than fits the bill. Best of all, jEdit is free, and the newest version has a simple double-click installation process.

On a related note, I made great progress with the Geeklog conversion project that prompted me to re-examine jEdit. The macosxhints site is now (on my local OS X box) at about the 95% stage in matching the current site's look and custom PHP features. Sometime over the next couple of weeks, we'll be upgrading the main site to Geeklog 1.35 as I get the last five percent done, and a couple of final bugs are squashed in Geeklog.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020429002812925