jEdit is a programmer's text editor written in Java, originally developed by Slava Pestov, now maintained by others. It has an easy to use interface that resembles that of many other Windows and MacOS text editors. It is also highly customizable, and contains a “plugin” architecture that allows its features to be extended by additional programs.

There is a comprehensive User's Guide available from within the program using the Help menu. The User's Guide can also be downloaded from the jEdit web site in Portable Document Format (PDF), suitable for online display or printing.

There may be many causes for this. Java by nature is more demanding on hardware than native applications. Modern computers should not have much problem with this. The most likely cause is plugins that parse buffers or do other computationally expensive operations. These include XML, SpeedJava and CodeAid. If performance is important to you, installing a whole batch of plugins in one go is probably not a very good idea. Install them one at a time, so you can evaluate the effects of each.

The short answer is, too many to list here. There is a detailed list available on the jEdit web site, but here are some of the major features: File management functions available from within jEdit, including deleting and renaming files and creating new directories internal “plugin manager” that downloads and installs new and updated plugins from within jEdit

A plugin is an application that is designed to work with jEdit by providing additional features that can be used from within the main program. Often the plugin will provide a visible user interface in a window that can be docked to jEdit's main view window. There are currently over 120 publicly available plugins that provide such services as a Java source code browser, a command-line shell, templated text insertion, and source code project management.

There are several. The official jEdit web site contains extensive information on all things having to do with jEdit. There are also resources available for those interested in jEdit development on the jEdit project page of the SourceForge web site. The jEdit Community web site has articles on jEdit and related topics, user-submitted macros and other download resources, and listings of web links of interest to jEdit users.

The jEdit application is free, “Open Source” software released under the GNU General Public License 2.0. This ensures that jEdit and its source code remains freely available for use and distribution by the public. For specific copyright questions, you should review the GPL 2.0 and seek appropriate advice.

Absolutely not. Many of the jEdit's plugin applications, and a few of the macros distributed with the program, target the Java language or integrate tools used in Java development. However, the core application is designed to work with any programming or markup language.

The archives of jEdit's mailing lists. Archives for both the jedit-users list and the jedit-devel list are available. If you cannot find help using those resources, post your question to the jedit-users list. You will have to subscribe to the mailing list in order to post, but it is well worth it, and you can elect to have daily bundles of messages sent to you to keep email traffic down. Many questions are answered on the mailing list within 24 hours.

There is an IRC channel, #jedit, available on the irc.freenode.net server that is dedicated to jEdit support and discussion among developers. You can reach it using any IRC client (including Chatzilla), as well as the IRC plugin for jEdit. There is almost always someone from the developer team signed on the channel. Just say hello and describe your problem.

To be as helpful as possible to the jEdit developer team and other users, you should use the bug tracker database that the jEdit project maintains on the SourceForge web site. You need to be a SourceForge member to post a bug report. Before posting a bug report, spend a few moments searching the bug database to see if a similar report has already been made. The bug tracker has a search facility that will let search for bug reports using a variety of criteria.

The program is in a continuing state of evolution. It is usually available in two versions, a “stable” version and a “development” version. A stable version represents a release of jEdit that is considered to be free of serious bugs or performance problems and suitable for general use. A “development” version includes new features or new elements of program design that require testing and possible further refinement.

If you don't have a clue as to why you cannot run jEdit, it's best to perform a step-by-step diagnosis. If it never worked before, begin by finding the Java application loader you are using: java.exe, javaw.exe or java. Make sure it is running by entering its full path with the -h parameter in a terminal or console window. If you can't find the Java application loader, your Java runtime environment package may be missing or incomplete. Next, find where you have installed jEdit.

It's important to realise that java applications should never do this. The problem is almost certainly a bug in the JVM. Problems of this nature are often tricky to solve. Depending on your platform, there should be information logged about what caused the crash to occur. For Unix type systems you will likely get an error in the console (and for Mac OS X you may also get a report in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/JavaApplicationStub.crash.log). Some recent problems with Java 1.4.

Some plugins require a lot of setup - chances are if you disable one, you will be able to determine the culprit. jEdit normally starts up quite quickly without plugins. Scroll to the area where you see lines like “[notice] JARClassLoader: Starting plugin XXX”.

Under some hardware configurations this can happen. It is only known to happen with Rage 128 Pro graphics cards. There appears to be a bug relating to the graphics card drivers that cause any carbon applications using the card to freeze. Since java 1.3.1 is carbon based, it suffers from this problem. Follow the instructions here to disable hardware acceleration. Java 1.4.x does not suffer from this problem (in beta at this time).

There are a number of plugins that you can use to compile Java source code. You can run a Java compiler on the command line in the “System” shell of the Console plugin. If you are using the JCompiler plugin, you will have a “JCompiler” shell in the Console plugin, and you can run the compile command for the current file, or the compilepkg command on all of the current directory's source code files.

First, make sure you have a working installation of the Java platform. To run jEdit, you will a platform package having a version number of at least 1.5.0_06. If you do not have the Java platform, we recommend downloading the larger “Software Development Kit” (SDK), instead of the smaller “Java Runtime Environment” (JRE), because you will need the tools supplied with the SDK if you will be using Java for development.

Simply delete the existing jEdit directory and run the installer (if any) to install the new version. Settings are kept in ~/.jedit, and will not be affected.

There are no system files, so simply drop the jEdit folder in the trash. If you want to remove the settings directory used by jEdit you will find it at ~/.jedit. It is hidden, so you will need to remove it from the command line, or use one of the various uilities available that will let you see it.

For the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems, jEdit provides an additional package of features called jEditLauncher. These features include: Support for opening files in jEdit using custom entries in the context (right-click) menu of the Windows shell; Support for launching jEdit and loading files using scripting languages such as VBScript, Perl and Python; Automatic uninstallation of jEdit using the “Add/Remove Programs” applet in Control Panel.

With *NIX (or cygwin), the Console plugin documentation has some ideas on how to use jEdit as the VISUAL editor when called from the cvs/svn/hg command-line tools, all of which can be run from the Console dockable. The ProjectViewer plugin has some support for reading the "entries" file for each directory, to decide which files to import. CVS/SVN are built-in. The P4Plugin adds Perforce support to ProjectViewer, and has some other advanced features for working with Perforce repositories.

I don't believe that a smarty edit mode is in jEdit 4.2 by default. However, you can easily [download] and install the config. for a smarty mode. To install, simply place the xml file in your jEdit/modes/ folder. From then on, you will see Smarty syntax-highlighting whenever you open a *.tpl file. You will need to restart jEdit in order for the new settings to take effect.

Go to the menu plugins->Lazy8Ledger->options. Select the "menu difficulty level" = "programer (just testing accounting)." Hit Ok. Exit jEdit and start jEdit. All your menus should be back to normal. this point, if you really want lazy8ledger completely gone from your hard disk, then go to the menu plugins->plugin manager, and remove lazy8ledger. Then, as a last step, you can go to the directory (home)/.jedit and remove the sub directory Lazy8Ledger.

Currently there is no newsgroup devoted to jEdit. There are three active mailing lists that are freely available by subscription: The jedit-devel list, for discussion of development issues by members of the developer team and other interested persons Each of these lists can be obtained on a full-text message or a daily digest basis. The daily digest bundles groups of postings in a single email message.

No. In fact, you do not need to know any specific programming language other than the ones with which you work. some point in your use of jEdit, you will no doubt want to write your own macros to execute long or complex routines with a single command or keyboard shortcut. Macros in jEdit are written in a simplified dialect of Java called BeanShell.

Since jEdit runs on a Java platform, at a minimum you will need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) package. If you are planning to use jEdit to program in Java, you will need a full Java Development Kit (JDK) package. We recommend obtaining a JDK package. The current version of jEdit, version 4.3, requires a Java runtime environment having a release version of 1.5 or greater. It will not run on versions 1.4 or 1.3.

If you know the bug report number, go to this web address: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=######&group_id=588&atid=100588, where ###### is the bug report number. If you don't know the bug report number, you can browse and search the bug database to find the problem in which you are interested.

The latest version of jEdit's source code is available from the jEdit web site or the SourceForge web site. The web site provides the source code for the latest stable and development version, while the SourceForge site has a more extensive archive covering earlier versions.

Perhaps the option to let Java draw window borders is enabled. This option can lead to strange behavior on some Java versions and operating systems. Disable it in the Appearance tab of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box. The full message that you may receive from the Java application launcher begins as follows: Exception in thread "main" java.util.zip.ZipException: No such file or directory ..