JEdit – Programmer's Text Editor | Hacker News Reader

JEdit – Programmer's Text Editor

jedit.org

234 pointsTomte99 comments

I started working on jEdit when I was 14 and developed it for 6 years or so. While I haven’t used it in a very long time I’m humbled to see that it is still being maintained and has users.

you were 14?! i always pictured you as much older back in those days when i was an avid user of it.

i found you on twitter awhile back, it brought back a lot of memories of being the only guy in the office who insisted on ecshewing IDEs in favor of something light yet capable like jedit. it was truly ahead of its time.

It had the feel of PFE for me which I loved when I was on Windows. You did great work.

I look back at JEdit very fondly. The whole project was very inspiring to me, I was always impressed at the results you were able to achieve.

Just out of curiosity: what editor do you use nowadays?

> Just out of curiosity: what editor do you use nowadays?

I’m pretty fond of Sublime Text these days.

The biggest things that cause friction in SublimeText compared to jEdit are the tabbed views instead of separation between Buffers/Views.

Then there's hypersearch, which is still the most versatile search implementation in an editor IMHO. (Perhaps a ripgrep integration underneath would speed it up!)

And there are the Highlight and SFTP plugins which are amazing and surprisingly hard to find (not that there aren't any, just not with the same specific nuances).

I could wax poetic all day. Thanks for jEdit.

I still use it. Best directory regex search and replace ever.

A great tool, trully a programmer's text editor. Used it for more than 10 years, it seemed like it had plugins for virtually eveything. I remember one time we had to work with huge XML files, like 100 MB in size or so, and everyone was grepping them or struggling with other editors, while jEdit had that nice XML parser plugin which showed a nice hierarchical tree :) Thanks for all the work put into it. Nowadays I tend to gravitate towards KDevelop and others but I hope jEdit continues on.

Thanks for all the work. I used it for many years as my primary software development editor.

I use it for ages (besides emacs). Properly configured it can stick with emacs at ease. The console plugin, however, might benefit from a brush up, e.g. FX, so it could display MathJax/KaTeX or PNG ...

I used it a lot when I was studying computer science 18 years ago. Thanks!

Just want to say the Factor is my favorite language for doing programming puzzles and challenges.

Same here. And jEdit is the only text editor I've ever seen with built in support for Factor syntax highlighting.

Thank you for jEdit. It is my favorite editor that I have used next to vim for the past 13 years.

It does SO many things right, that I can't find a single editor that can do the same things well. Combined with some of the plugins, that I haven't found good replacements for, it is one of my favorite pieces of software ever.

Thank you.

I wrote a buffer switch plugin for jEdit which you reviewed and gave feedback on. Didn't know you were 14 - thought you were some expert, greybeard Java programmer lol.

Thanks for the plugin, it's awesome.

Kudos, Slava!! About 15 years ago, what really surprised me was the speed at which jEdit used to start up and react, compared to many other JVM-based applications. I found it to be a great, simple editor - I am an avid Emacs user for the most part.

Thank you, I got my start in webdev using this editor. Used to update prod code with the SFTP plugin :)

This reminds me of BlueJ. Does anyone remember BlueJ with its auto generated class diagrams?

I remember it quite fondly and even remember its predecessor Blue.

Just throwing a wild idea out there, if you ever decide to write a non-jvm based port of jEdit, possibly with support for the older plug-ins, I think it would become the best editor.

So is factor probably.

Will be interesting if you pick up a new hobby project once you retire from day job.

I've been using jEdit for probably around 18 years until around a year ago when I fianlly switched to VSCode because, unfortunately, it just couldn't keep up with all the modern development in the dev tools space.

There are two features I really miss from jEdit:

* "dumb" autocomplete that will include any word in any open buffer, even if it's a different type (html/css/js). VSCode kindo of has word based autocomplete, but expected matches are just not there on third of teh time.

* HyperSearch (search result in the sidebar) when searching in the current buffer only. So much better than having one search mode for single buffer, and a completely different one when serching through multiple files.

Long time jEdit user too sorta "forced" go VSCode for similar reasons and missing the exact same two features.

Any ideas how to get those in VSCode? Anyone know any like plugins?

I don't use jedit but from the description this look like emacs hippie expand, so this plugin in vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mksafi.s...

I keep an install of jEdit just for the HyperSearch feature.

The feature that got me hooked on jEdit many years ago was the ability to define custom syntax highlighting for our custom mini-languages with powerful directives that other highlighting solutions couldn't match without building plugins/extensions.

In case you’re wondering where the funny name “HyperSearch” came from, it’s the built-in editor in the TkDesk file manager/launcher (which was pretty neat back in the day): http://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/guide/guide-7.html

Exactly this. I recently created a tiny DSL (can be trivially parsed with .split('\n') and regex) for a side project. I wanted to create a very simplistic syntax highlighter for it in VSCode, but I realized I needed to create an extension using a code generator, and write a bunch of manifest files. In addition, to use/distribute the extension without having to run VSC in development mode means I had to create a developer account, generate some token, and publish it to the marketplace.

A great editor which works everywhere Java does. I used it for almost a decade alongside a few embedded SDKs, and on Mac, Linux, and Windows. The ability to quickly define my own syntax file was great for working with a niche language like Verifone TCL.

Find/replace among many files at once was also in the normal find dialog, with a solid regexp implementation. Which seemed rare for the era in which I used it.

These days we have VS Code and JetBrains so I don't use it any more. Still, much nostalgia.

Sure but these (VSCode / JB) don't just load instantly, for me, on Windows, it's still Notepad++ - on Linux, which is rare for me, I still just vim

I mean just leave a window open unless you're starved for memory? I always have an emacs org mode window open and a vscode window open.

Similar story with me too. Used it for over a decade, but don't use it any more.

The original author, Slava Pestov, created Factor programing language and was working on Swift when I last heard.

There was a time when a Swing application felt heavyweight, but today, it feels extremely lightweight (including JVM startup).

(Not IntelliJ, which is horrible in every regard.)

> (Not IntelliJ, which is horrible in every regard.)

Curious, why is IntelliJ so thoroughly bad?

It’s definitely horribly bad in anything related to loading.

I can’t find anything to replace it’s features though.

This. The feature set in their suite of IDEs is amazing. The occasional lag though, man, sometimes I wonder if they actually use their own IDE. I don't think Java is to blame either, I have Java apps with much higher heaps and lower pause times...

It's kinda fun. By now I'm used to writing Android code with what I write showing up on the screen only every couple seconds.

Mind, not all the time, but enough to get used to it.

It seems disabling smooth scrolling helps for some reason.

Compared to jedit, stability is a huge issue as IntelliJ seems to take a “move fast” approach which makes each update risky especially given their recent QA issues.

IntelliJ also doesn’t scale very well for large code bases due to the number of features it tries to provide. Basic things like project opening can take tens of minutes while jedit takes seconds (if that) as it’s not trying to build a syntax tree at load time.

This brings back memories. My professor (many years ago now) had us use JEdit when learning Java because it lets us inspect objects at runtime. Obviously not 'industry standard', but very instrumental in learning about data structures and debugging. So happy to see software like this still being maintained.

Nice to see there are so many of us! I, too, used jEdit for ages - the decade+ between when NEdit's lack of utf-8 support became a critical problem, and Vscode took over the world.

I remember I had a hook that saved ALL my manual text editing in a HG repository, with the help of various jEdit features. Commit on every save. I figured if it was worth doing by hand, it was worth saving.

Ha, JEdit, good memories ! I used it for all my Java development from around mid 2000's to early 2010's. Then I didn't touch Java much, stuck to Python and C.

I was very comfortable with JEdit, it was never on my way to bother me when coding. It was working as intended, with no bugs or quirks. I preferred by far to the then fashionable Eclipse IDE and IntelliJ IDE. With JEdit, you made your own IDE by choosing your plugins.

JEdit was and still is an example of good software. Than k you Slava.

I used jedit today, and actually I use it most days. It's a great piece of software and these days, the only reason I have to install a java runtime on my Linux boxes. Hypersearch is outstanding, I love the approach to macros (and I've written dozens for myself), and its approach to syntax highlighting is great.

I wrote five book manuscripts for a book publisher that used a custom typesetting syntax - not exactly XML but codes to turn on bold and highlighting, designate section headings, identify keywords, and place specific icons in the book. I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to hack an emacs syntax highlighting format, but with Jedit it only took an hour. I was then able to install Jedit on my co-author's Mac, where the software interface was easy enough for him to use without finding it too techie. Huge success. (Later I figured out how to create a vim syntax, but to this day I my custom emacs config goes uncreated).

I use different editors for different purposes, but Jedit is on every Linux box I build, and I use it regularly. VERY grateful for this software!

Seeing the name and being unfamiliar with "J"Edit, I had hopes this was an open source version of the 1982-~2018 commercial "K"Edit editor.

I've been using Kedit for some time as my daily editor, but its lack of UTF-8 support is becoming more dire by the year. Still, the IBM ISPF/Xedit roots and Rexx support make for a powerful environment. An overview of such "Eastern Orthodox" text editors is on SoftPanorama:

http://www.softpanorama.org/Editors/eoe.shtml

A fascinating account of someone productively using Kedit is included in the following article by John McPhee, of all people:

https://archive.mith.umd.edu/engl668k/wp-content/uploads/201...

Huh, I remember KDE included an editor with the same name back in version 3. I wonder if they changed it to Kate / Kwrite to avoid confusion.

> A fascinating account of someone productively using Kedit is included in the following article by John McPhee, of all people

A truly fascinating read, thanks for sharing!

Just to note that there's another long-established text editor, for Macs only, with a very similar name: Jedit.

http://www.artman21.com/en/jeditOmega/

While this Jedit has features for programmers, I think it really shines as an editor for people who write or work with Japanese text. I've been using it on a daily basis for many years.

I started using this(still do) as the "recommended default" for my intro web design and programming classes, mostly because I'm a long time Linux user, and this would run exactly the same for all of us everywhere. Solid stuff, thank you to the devs.

I remember being ‘caught’ developing for Metrowerks (anyone remember that?) using jEdit. They smirked.

I used jEdit to do all my coding (mostly C/C++ in those days) from the late 90s until finally going Jetbrains just a couple of years ago.

I still use it regularly when I just want to edit a file or use the jdiff plugin without starting a project and all the other speed bumps that IDEs put in your way.

User since maybe mid 00's here, I still load it to use the rectangular select and multi-line cursor, and HyperSearch still beats grep because I can jump to all instances of a searched word and see the context before/after it (yeah grep has a flag for this, but who knows how many lines the context should be).

Yeap the rectangular select and multi-line cursor thing! And the find replace with new lines. And so much else that mainstream IDEs seem to still struggle with!

I used jEdit years ago as my editor of choice for pretty much any OS i used and it was very flexible with a lot of extensions (most likely still is). I remember a friend of mine saying something along the lines of "it isn't a true editor until you can read email off it" (which i guess was his paraphrasing of JWZ's "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail" though i didn't knew it at the time) as an attempt to tell me how Emacs was better, but, sure enough, i quickly found an email plugin for jEdit :-P. Though i never used that one, i did use the IRC client plugin a bit.

I loved jEdit for the time I used it. It was my favorite text editor before switching for dedicated IDE with integrated debugger. Highly configurable and responsive. I wrote a tiny blog post about my technical supervision [0] and puts a tiny jEdit screenshot at the time.

[0]: https://www.fevrierdorian.com/blog/post/2011/07/21/Tales-of-...

The Isabelle Proof Assistant[1] uses JEdit as its IDE. Just thought it is worth mentioning.

[1]: https://isabelle.in.tum.de/

There is an emacs mode/plugin called Proof General which almost all Proof Assistant can use (and some practically require). That was a barrier to entry, certainly, getting used to emacs editing conventions. So I'm not surprised a jEdit alternative came about. For many years, jEdit was by far the best emacs alternative with modern CUA conventions (these days, I got to admit VSCode is hard to beat).

When we were taught Java at university, we were taught it using BlueJ because it could visualise objects and had some other beginner friendly features. For our assignments we were given the choice of using BlueJ to write the code, or JEdit. Considering BlueJ was horrible to use for me as a power user and pretty decent at PHP back then, I struggled really hard. JEdit was came to the rescue. It certainly wasn't the best, but it good enough and loved it.

As a non-programmer, I am surprised that I have never heard of this until now. I use vim, what would make me change / be interested in jEdit?

Unless you don't use features in vim that are available in jEdit, I don't see why it would be worth switching.

I'm curious though, I don't meet many non-coders using Vim. What's your main use case? What features do you use a lot in Vim for what you do?

>I'm curious though, I don't meet many non-coders using Vim. What's your main use case? What features do you use a lot in Vim for what you do?

I bet he/she is a sado masochist. Probably something like a kindergarten teacher or deep sea fisherperson.

Jeez dude. Did Vim somehow hurt you that bad?

God forbid someone uses a different tool than you for their own reasons, right?

Not everyone loves vim on first site. We were forced to use it in my first C class for in class coding tests. The first week I literally hated it and wouldn't have used it unless forced. 2 weeks in I found it tolerable and after a month it finally made a lot of sense why they did the editor the way they did it. I was pretty bitter up and until then, maybe they just never were forced over that hump :) . Now pretty much everything I use I look for "vi mode" first thing even my shells

They made us use emacs for CS work.

I just kept a little cheat sheet and used it like notepad though lol

I am a qualified civil engineer but I did a full-time course in Cloud Computing a few years back and came across vim. It just struck me as a brilliant idea and I mainly use it to type text files along with a little bit of python programming / web development.

Another good Java text editor is https://github.com/bobbylight/RText. It's open-source w/ very good documentation and you can embed the IDE (RSyntaxTextArea) in your own app.

Great editor. Everything just worked as you thought it should. The plugin system was clean and powerful. The FTP plugin was a lifesaver. Used jedit to reverse engineer the design from a legacy C++ codebase on Solaris. I don't think I would have managed it in vim.

I remember hating Swing when it was new

but my god it's excellent UX wise compared to pretty much any website

Yeah, I miss writing swing web apps haha :) . I'm watching webasm in the hopes it becomes popular. I just never got into the whole web stack with css/html/javascript. I can get stuff done with them but I usually hate every minute of it. Most of the time I get to work on embedded code so it's a non-issue.

Didn't know that editor.

Here are some pros(+) and cons(-):

+ Is included in Debian!

+ Just works

+ Snappy

+ Extensive file parsing: extensive syntax highlighting but also brace matching, etc, including for less common languages like assembly.

+ Many plugins, easy to choose and install, just works.

~ No easy way to simple get a dark mode. Fiddling with plugins and editor theme can somehow get a mostly dark theme.

- Falls into the same traps as so many programs regarding keyboard layout: announces key shortcuts, like Ctrl-ClosingBracket, and if your keyboard is not standard qwerty you can't find any actual keypress combination that works. Fortunately, it's easy enough to edit your own, still it loses the (arguably important) convenience of an already existing set of keyboard shortcuts.

Oh damn, that brings me back. First editor I used beyond notepad for coding. Was required for my AP CS class in high school.

Back in the day, there was a nice editor I used for a while, called PFE, for Programmer's File Editor. It ran on Windows. It was lightweight and fast, IIRC. Nothing exceptional in terms of features, but one useful feature was that it could open and edit fairly large text files (for that time).

jEdit was my main editor for about two or three years. An excellent and in some ways very underrated project. I see that the original author is here in this thread - if you happen to see this I just wanted to say thank you for this editor that brought me many hours of productivity and enjoyment!

For the longest, I have been looking for a text editor that uses some of the themes used in highlight.js [0]. I can never seem to find one whenever I look.

0: https://highlightjs.org/

You can copy the themes yourself?

Unfortunate naming collision with an earlier multi-platform text editor by Prof. John E. Davis:

https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/

and someone else has already mentioned Jedit Ω

Prof. Davis' software is Jed. Slava Pestov's is Jedit. All is good.

Nostalgic. This was my first text editor. I used it to learn programming in perl.

I used to use it and have fond memories of it. I think it is getting a little long in the tooth for today. Maybe I will fire it up and see what's changed in the last couple of years.

A great light weight editor! I still use it from time to time.

The best part of jEdit is its abysmally low memory footprint. It is still one of the best minimalist Java editor, although it can be used for other languages too.

Abysmal is usually (but sometimes rarely not) used to portray a bad thing/connotation. Did you mean something more like “miniscule memory footprint” ?

JEdit developers themselves use IntelliJ to develop it?

"IntelliJ IDEA license provided free to jEdit developers for improving jEdit."

jEdit is a general text editor, it makes sense to use a specialized tool (IDE) for development.

I made the jswat plugin back in the day, good times :)

I'm also shocked you started work on this so young!

I just want notepad++ for the mac

BBEdit?

I always wanted PFE for the mac, but I did a lot of data munging that code editors tended to be bad at.

I switched to Geany from Notepad++ when I moved to Linux, and they have macOS build too. Features are not on par, but at least the editor component is the same (Scintilla), and I could set up some of the plugin functionalities as command line functions (like formatting JSON with jq).

In my experience sublime blows it out of the water with plugins and such if you are willing to part with $80

Ahhh the sweet memories!!! Do use it with FTP and SFTP plugin to edit your PHP live!

This was my first experience of syntax highlighting! Blew my mind as a kid

Non anti-aliased fonts... That alone makes it non-atractive.

There is a screenshot explicitly titled "subpixel antialised fonts". http://www.jedit.org/index.php?page=screenshot&image=36

It was really hideous. My first thought when reading the title was remembering how terrible it was and thinking "yuuuuck"

Jeez, considering the author is in this thread perhaps you could be a little more polite.

I apologize to the author but I was simply stating my experience with the software. There are countless pieces of software I have used with barely a memory. But this one in particular just prompted a visceral reaction from my usage

It’s acquired taste (like coffee).

It has anti-aliased fonts.

Yeah, for a while it was some work to get it working though. Not jEdit's fault, but the JVMs/system defaults. The distro packaging wasn't great for a while, you would often get something fairly broken if you just went with the defaults.

> Non anti-aliased fonts...

Sign me up. Font aliasing is the devil's work.

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