Rating and comments for jEdit

The ultimate editor for programers, and the unlimited notepad for those who simply like notepad applications for all sorts of reasons...

With plugins, and in-built features, this application can do every conceivable thing for programers, webmasters, coders, even just regular authors, but, despite that it is also simply a notepad, so even someone who just wants to write some notes, or use a notepad for some reason, but who rightly dislikes the Notepad that comes with MS (or Simple Text with macintosh) this is the penultimate...

At present has very poor programming language support, and many plugin developers don't even mention that their plugins are for Java only; it seems they think that's the only language there is. There is some support for C/C++/C# and a couple of other languages, but anybody outside the mainstream will be writing their own language tools.

For fast Java source code hacking/viewing I use SciTE instead. To professionally develop a program you'll need a complete IDE like Eclipse.

In contrast to what digitig says, jEdit has loads of support for other languages and data formats, as long as you download (and configure) the plugins. In fact, I don't even write Java applications, and it still is my favorite editor.

So what do I do with it? Everything! I write php, sql, ini, xml, xhtml, javascript, c++, makefiles and more in it and it colors all of them in an appropriate fashion. You can search with regular expressions, which is blazingly fast, in multiple documents (even complete folders if you want), make macros for everything you want to do with a press of a button and, my favorite point, you can view multiple files at once! Yes, its that good ;).

The only bad thing I can think is the learning curve you need to get past in order to respect the editor. But once you get beyond this point and have the editor configured the way you want it, you will never want to use anything ever again, my guarantee!

It is a heavy-weight editor. To make it suitable to develop Rails apps, I had to install about 10 plugins, and jEdit slowed down a bit. I'd switch to native Rails editors (they're faster), but jEdit's functionality is very good.
Strong CPU recommended (stronger than Core 2 Duo E6400).

I have been using jEdit approximately 8 hours a day for the past two years (embedded code, web programming.) I have about 40 plugins loaded, half of those I am using constantly. Prior to jEdit, I was using UltraEdit for about ten years. I have been playing with alternatives recently but at this time jEdit still comes out on top without much of a strain.