JEdit: the forgotten editor

These days, I'm rethinking lots of stuff regarding my geeky life. For work reasons, I hugely increased my exposure to Java. And to my surprise, I find it quite bearable. Perhaps, one day, I'll say that I actually like it. This is much more likely if they just add closures... but that's another story.

In this process, I decided to try JEdit. Back then, some people suggested JEdit as a viable alternative. I quite refused the claim based on some hasty experiments. I think that my bias was such that I could not be pleased with it. Perhaps back then (10 years ago or something like that) it was not that good; perhaps not. And then I sticked to my early negative experience.
As a partial excuse I can point out that back then the unix community was very skeptical on everything which was not vim and Emacs (with the same old flame wars among the editors).

Right now, I'm using jEdit quite a lot and I want to describe my impressions. First: its main drawback is that it is slow to load. It is quite objective, even on my MacPro. However, BBEdit is not much faster and I use that regularly. But like BBEdit it is very fast to open new files once it is opened. In other words, you can just leave it open and that is fine. Of course, with vi this is not necessary. The other major drawback is that it can't work in text only mode: if you need to edit files remotely, you might be in a trouble.

However, the ssh/ftp plugin is quite useful and partially solves this problem. By the way, there is no reason not to use vim when needs arises.

jEdit supports 130 syntax languages (according to wikipedia, I did not count them), which is good. In fact, it is likely that you open a file and gets the correct syntax highlight and customizable options for each of them. Which I find nice.

Plugins

jEdit plugins are very easy to install; easier than default installation process on Emacs and vim, though auto-installers are catching up. In fact, even easier than text mate and bbedit plugins. In the plugin list, there are lots of different plugins; the majority are java related, but this is not exclusive. Some plugins just remind me of good old programming practices. For example the whitespace plugin does many whitespace related functions, like showing trailing whitespace and auto-removing it on save or auto-converting between tabs and spaces. This is something most programmers want.

jEdit has very flexible frame management. It is possible to split text area in different parts, dock and undock specific panes. For example with the Console module it is possible to have a "shell". The users chooses to have it in a separate window or to place it at the bottom of the main frame. Emacs anyone?

Of course, in the console windows it is possible to place many different REPLs, such as a Python or a Prolog shell. Or clojure (which, is also installed by the plugin: installing the plugin fully sets up a working clojure environment).

Another very useful feature is the integration with BeanShell (which allows running Java snippets). Moreover, plugins can also be written in Jython and other JVM supported languages. Of course there are plugins providing Java autocomplete and refactoring and similar stuff.

The are plugins to do spell-check and most things one expects from a text editor, latex mode, etc etc etc. The XML mode provides autocomplete for HTML files (or perhaps it is just builtin), and that makes it quite a powerful editor for HTML.

Macros

jEdit supports macros, which should be rather akin to other macro facilities ;they do not only generate text (but can remove, modify or do completely text unrelated stuff like changing interface elements). I have not explored this part yet.

The Editor

Then, it comes to basic text editing capabilities. Here is the point where most NENV (Non Emacs, Non Vim) editors fail. They just suck at manipulating text. jEdit, even though not the most powerful editor I tried, is an honest contender here.

Abbreviations provide expansion of long snippets of text. Buffer based completion is also available.

The clipboard is very powerful: there are "registers" and it is possible to manipulate text in there, append text to clipboard, vertical paste, etc. All this possibilities have keyboard shortcuts.

Selection is also keyboard controllable (move one word/character/paragraph forward/backward etc). It is possible to select code blocks, up to parentheses, etc...

Search comes in two flavors: incremental search and "standard" search. Regular expressions are available. Moreover, it is possible to apply search to whole directories, filtering files according to file names. The "replace" part can also be provided by a bean shell expression, which basically gives unlimited power to the replace feature.

Other text related features (spaces->tabs, lowercase, delete to end of line, delete to start of line, etc) are provided. So it is paren matching.

Markers (bookmarks) are supported, and so it is folding. Some utilities (file managers and similar stuff) are provided, and manual editing of jedit configuration files is also available.

Conclusion

I think that jEdit is a seriuos contender in the "2nd generation" editor market. It is free, it supports many languages in a rather complete way. Of course, many languages which are supported in Emacs (haskell, ocaml, erlang, ...) are not supported. However, it is a nice alternative to do lightweight java editing, to work with Python, web editing and similar stuff. Moreover, it is a very interesting alternative for Clojure/Scala development.