Why the jEdit Text Editor Rocks

Here I describe the reasons why jEdit is almost certainly the best text editor in the world. jEdit's creator, Slava Pestov, is a genius – you can tell from the power and extensibility of his creation.

jEdit lets you use both monospaced fonts and proportional fonts. Here it is with one of my favorite fonts, Franklin Gothic:



Everything that this text editor does can be assigned to a shortcut key of your choosing. And even a second shortcut key, if you desire.



You can turn on rectangular-selection with Alt+\ (or Ctrl+dragging with your mouse). This lets you type in several lines at once.



You can also turn on multi-selection with Ctrl+\. This lets you create multiple selections and type on them at the same time.

Check out jEdit's powerful Search And Replace window below. Yes, that search field contains a regular expression with multiple newlines. And yes, that replacement field contains real Java code. Being able to replace text with the result of an arbitrary Java expression is tremendously powerful.



jEdit offers syntax highlighting for more than 130 languages. Here's some Haskell code, for example:



I love jEdit's integrated FTP/SFTP support. The file tree below is for a remote SFTP server. It's better than the SFTP support in UltraEdit, which lets you see the contents of only one tree node at a time (painful!).



I quite like the Highlight Occurrences function, which I've assigned to Alt+5. It lights up every occurrence of the word at the cursor. Below I'm highlighting the word "dojo". And see those little triangles on the left? Those are code-folding buttons – press them to fold up the code, to make it easier to see the structure.



One of the nicest features about jEdit is its PlugIn Manager. Here you can choose from 150 plugins to add various capabilities to jEdit. And best of all, you don't need to restart the editor – the plugins are ready for immediate use.



The plugins I've installed are: Code2HTML, Console, Editor Scheme, FTP, Highlight, MacroManager, PHPParser, SwitchBuffer, TextTools, and WhiteSpace. Here are the options added by the TextTools plugin, for example:



I often find myself using Sort Lines, Delete Duplicated, and Shuffle Lines.

If you don't like the color scheme, the Editor Scheme plugin gives you 22 others to choose from; or you can create your own. Here's the "Emacs" color scheme:



You can configure the number of Recent Files listed. I've set mine to 120:



Pressing Ctrl+Space will autocomplete the current word, using keywords from the current language as well as other words found in the current file.



The Console plugin adds a handy terminal window. Here I've docked it at the bottom of the editor:



The Buffer Options window lets you choose the line terminator, character encoding, and other options:



Often it's useful to be able to split the window horizontally or vertically, so you can see another file (or a different part of the same file). Ctrl+2 splits the view horizontally; Ctrl+3 splits the view vertically; Ctrl+0 removes the splits. You can also duplicate the view in a new window by clicking View > New View



And I haven't even mentioned incremental search, macro recording, HyperSearch, incremental switch-to-buffer, and many other features. Plus it's free and it works on Windows, Unix, and Macs.

jEdit. Those who like it, like it a lot.