JEdit
Every once in a while I used to go on an odyssey trying to find a free alternative to IMHO one of the best editors out there: Ultra-Edit. When I discovered PSPad I thought I finally found home but… nope, PSPad simply is too buggy (endless loops when using RegExp find’n'replace, complete mess when switching between HEX and ASCII mode, block highlighting works but block insertion doesn’t, and and and). Anyway, I came across JEdit before but at the time the Java VM didn’t have the performance it has today and I didn’t really like the Swing interface. But then again this is only a question of habit (and of course there are many themes you can chose from).
JEdit is a modular plug-in based highly extensible application with a large community and lots of plug-ins already. In fact, many of the features you probably expect to be part of the core application are implemented as plug-ins. For example, I had a hard time finding out that the feature to sort the lines of a file requires the TextTools plug-in. Talking about plug-ins: the ones I currently use are TextTools, BufferTabs, and Console. Console I like a lot. Especially under Windows where the command histroy is kept even if you close the application. Not like the standard cmd.exe where all the commands you type are lost when you close the window.
No need to talk about the standard features. Regular Expressions, syntax highlighting, markers, folding, and macros. Its all there.
But there is no light w/o shade. So far, I am not very happy with the HEX plug-ins. But to be honest, I haven’t investigated all that much, yet. Another drawback is that it takes quite some time to get used to the user interface. I don’t like changing default configurations that much and up to now I haven’t found a practical way to use shortcuts for plug-ins. Another problem I have is that I use a German keyboard and many predefined shortcuts use special characters that need the [ALT] key on the German clavier. Thus, the shortcuts do not work. Anyone solved this already? Another problem seems to be RAM handling. If you want to edit large files you must run the Java VM with a special option. The JEdit FAQ is your friend ;-)
As a conclusion I would say that JEdit is almost as powerful as UltraEdit in some aspects even stronger. The Java interface is not everyones taste but you can get along with it. For the performance there is a “hidden” option which loads JEdit in the background where it stays until you kill the process. Starting a new JEdit window afterwards feels almost like launching a native application. Well, and probably the killer argument is that it is open source published under the GPLv2. My advise: check it out!
About
Originally this site was intended as a project site. The goal was to define standards for the perimeterless network using
open-source software. To be honest I simply do not have the time for such a thing. So what is left is a blog with sporadic
posts that are either helpful for myself or I think are helpful for others, too since I had a hard time finding information
on the Internet. Think of it as a knowledge base.
Ehm yes, somtimes I write down my two cents on any topic that may go through my mind at that point in time ;-)