title: Is jEdit the new vi? link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/is-jedit-the-new-vi/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 245 created: 2009/09/20 20:10:45 created_gmt: 2009/09/20 20:10:45 comment_status: open post_name: is-jedit-the-new-vi status: publish post_type: post

Is jEdit the new vi?

OK, maybe that’s a little extreme. Nothing will ever be quite like vi.

Thank God.

Over the years I’ve used a variety of text editors on various operating systems. Like vde on CP/M or the venerable edit.com on MSDOS. When I started working with UNIX and UNIX-like systems I quickly learned that knowing vi was essential. Although I did spend some time struggling with emacs, my all-time least favorite editor is still… ed.

Over the 3 or 4 years I’ve bounced back and forth between vim (the vi clone that also has a X11/GTK version, gvim) and gedit for the most part. While vim works pretty well for me, I’ve been increasingly frustrated by gedit’s failure to handle certain file formats as well as its propensity for sometimes pasting text not quite at the cursor position during script editing sessions (in some cases tens of lines down from it, in fact, resulting in nasty surprises at run time). Around 5 years or so ago I gave jEdit a try, but abandoned it soon after because i found it still too unpolished for regular use.

Recently I had occasion to give jEdit another try, when a variety of other editors on UNIX and WIndows failed to properly display some special characters in what was supposed to be a UTF-8 encoded file.

Now I’m no cheerleader for Java, but if Sun got anything right in the development of the language putting internationalization at its core was one.

Because jEdit is a pure Java application it was, of course, able to handle the character encoding without any difficulty where most others failed, including gedit. That kind of did it for me.

Installing jEdit on CentOS 5 was a breeze, the version packaged by Dag in rpmforge (named “jedit”) worked flawlessly. Of course I had JDK 1.6.0 installed on my system to support Eclipse and other Java apps, so the prereqs were already accounted for.

There are a number of useful plugins for jEdit installable through the editor’s interface. One thing you need to do before trying to download and install these is to go into the Plugin Manager (off the main toolbar), select “Download Options”, “Update mirror list” and choose a working mirror site (I set mine to Europe’s SWITCH in Amsterdam). Of the plugins currently available I found the one that interested me most to be the PerlSideKick and TextTools, the former offering some IDE-like programming assistance for script writers like me.

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