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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
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Page last modified on June 07, 2014, at 01:39 PM