#Jedit gallery windows#

That's not necessarily a bad thing, unless you're a Windows programmer who needs a dialog box for everything you do. You'll have to edit a configuration file if you want to tweak it to your liking. Keep this in mind when I tell you that there's no fancy configuration dialog in J. In addition, if you double-click on a file, it will bring up that file in the edit buffer.Įditor's note: The above image is reduced in size to allow it to display on this page. However, if you double-click on a directory in that file, you'll navigate the same way as if you used the folder tree. On first glance, it almost looks like this action is useless, as the editor window appears to be a text file with a listing of your directory. When you click on a folder, a list of files in that directory appears in an editor window. The left-hand pane contains a folder tree, much like the Windows Explorer. Here's its secret: J treats just about everything as an edit buffer, including help files and directory listings. It also includes enough convenience to prevent most people from tossing it out the window on the first try. If you've been using console-based editors, you'll feel right at home.

One reason is that J reeks with just enough geek to be efficient and just enough pizazz to be appealing. The J editor manages to deliver many of the features in Jedit without plug-ins and without consuming as much memory. Here's a rundown of the memory usage of Jedit without plug-ins as compared to two similar editors, J and Jext.

As a result, a fully loaded Jedit actually begins to rival full-featured IDEs - bloat, wizards and all. Nevertheless, so many excellent plug-ins are available for it that one cannot help but be tempted to use them. In my last article, I raved about one such program, called Jedit. Where Slava and I probably differ is that I like both there are times when I want a lean, mean editor and times when I enjoy a good, bloated editor packed with wizards.įortunately, there are plenty of both to go around for the Linux user looking for a Java-based development environment. I might agree - with the possible exception of Eclipse, which isn't editor-centric. To paraphrase his opinion, IDEs are just bloated editors loaded down with a bunch of wizards. When I ran into Slava Pestov, the core developer of Jedit, on IRC, I asked him what he thought of some of the increasingly popular Java-based integrated development environments (IDE) such as Eclipse and NetBeans.

Jedit gallery