Moving from PSPad to jEdit
UPDATE: these day i moved to SublimeText
On Windows, Ultraedit is a good scripting environment. The most obvious free replacement is PSPad. I like PSPad but it is not cross platform and has some strange ways for customization and an editor should be very customizable.
Note in advance: what i dislike about jEdit/Java = It's Java!, stability (a few minor glitches), lack of OS native touch&feel. Having that said... jedit is quite stable and responsive.
- Languages i mostly use: Ksh, Perl, Python, AHK, vbs, HTML/CSS, configs & logs, txt, ...
- Little or no usage: XML, Javascript, Powershell, Java, ...
Wanted features (no particular order):
- line numbers
- color coding
- code explorer, ctags, parser ...
- customizable external program hooks, compile/run
- grep, line filter
- column mode, rectangular selection (preferably with ctrl-key)
- space/tab visualization
- soft auto indent (tabs become spaces)
- open files over sftp/scp
- regex search & replace
- easy increase/decrease fontsize
- capitalization options
- some form of scripting that can cover any of the above features and/or suitable plugin system
- customizable toolbars (this is what killed PSPad for me)
- cross platform
- split window (see, at least 2, different parts of the code)
- fast startup
- HEX view
- free
replacement challenge: AHK
I like PSPad for the AHK setup that i have with color coding, custom code exploring and mainly external compile/run/tools buttons. DONE!
surprising features with jEdit:
- macro with shortcuts for moving line up/down and related features make jedit a good outliner program
- the multiple result hypersearch is heavenly!
- i have yet to find an option that you cannot put a shortcut on.
Startup speed up (this is now an option from the installer)
You can speed up jEdit by running a copy of jEdit server at Windows startup which is running in system background. To do so, you'll have to add to Autostart menu link to jEdit'a with two parameters: -background -nogui, for example: "C:\Program Files\jEdit\bin\jEdit.exe" -background -nogui
You can also disable displaying splash screen at startup (Uncheck "Show splash screen on startup" in "Utilities>Global Options...>Appearance"menu.
whishlist (should be easy to fix)
- delete empty lines (regext replace: \n\s*\n with \n), macro:link, texttools.
- sort lines, macro:link, texttools.
- automatic numbering and bullet-points in text
- find lines NOT containing PAT: ^(?:(?!PAT).)*$
- replace with regex= replace this ^(...)([0-9]) with this $1-$2