The bottomline is that I like jEdit because it was the only editor or IDE that I could find that has file support and syntax highlighting for eRuby, Ruby, PHP and Unicode. Out of dozens of commercial and open source editors and IDEs and Jedit came out on top. The rest of Jedits features are just a pure gold setting around a brilliant piece of software programming. And it is free!

A good while ago I wrote up a list of 10 things a PHP IDE just had to have. Along with this list came a good amount of things that were pet peeves of mine when it comes to developer software. You can read it for yourself and see what you think. I am not going to go through that list again but just say that Jedit has fulfilled almost all of the list of needs and avoided many of the things that irritate me about coding IDEs. The only drawback to Jedit is that it reinforces my arguement that text editors have better software developers than IDE makers. Now having siad that the rest of this is a recap from the Jedit website.

Jedit is a Unicode text editor that is written in Java and can run under Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. It can be used with any text file, but is intended for editing programming and markup languages, and has syntax colouring for over 60 of these, including HTML and XML. jEdit can open and save files with any encoding that is supported by Java, including UTF-8 and UTF-16.

General

• Combines the best functionality of Unix, Windows and MacOS text editors.
• Runs on any operating system with a Java 2 version 1.3 or higher virtual
  machine - this includes MacOS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows.
• Efficient keyboard shortcuts for everything
• Comprehensive online help
• Unlimited undo/redo
• Copy and paste with an unlimited number of clipboards (known as "registers")
• Register contents are saved across editing sessions (4.2)
• "Kill ring" automatically remembers previously deleted text (4.2)
• Rich set of keyboard commands for manipulating entire words, lines and
  paragraphs at a time
• "Markers" for remembering positions in files to return to later
• Marker locations are saved across editing sessions
• Any number of editor windows may be open, each window may be split into
  several areas, each area can view a different file. Alternatively, different
  locations in one file can be viewed in more than one area
• Multiple open windows and split windows are remembered between editing
  sessions (4.2)
• Rectangular selection
• Multiple selection (sometimes known as "discontinuous" or "additive"
  selection) for manipulating several chunks of text at once
• Word wrap

Syntax Highlighting

jEdit supports syntax highlighting for more than 130 file types:

There are even more contributed syntax highlighting modes at the
jEdit community
web site.

Source Code Editing

• Intelligent bracket matching skips quoted literals and comments
• Auto indent
• Commands for shifting the indent left and right
• Commands for commenting out code
• Soft tabs option
• Abbreviations
• Folding, with two fold modes: indent-based, and explicit (where
  the buffer is parsed for "{{{" and "}}}")

Search and Replace

• Both literal and regular expression search and replace supported
• Multiple file search and replace; search in either the current file, all
  open files, or all files in a directory
• "HyperSearch" option to show all found matches in a list
• Reverse search supported
• Incremental search supported
• Option to replace occurrences of a regular expression with the return value
  of a BeanShell script. As far as I know, no other text editor offers comparable
  functionality!

File Management

• Any number of files can be opened at once
• Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and UTF16
• Automatic detection of several character encodings (4.2)
• Automatic compression and decompression of GZipped (.gz) files
• Any character encoding supported by Java can be used to load and save files
• Multi-threaded I/O system supports pluggable "virtual file systems" for
  listing directories and loading files:
  • FTP plugin adds support for loading and saving files on FTP servers
  • Archive plugin adds read-only support for loading files from ZIP and TAR
    archives
• Custom file system browser component used in open and save dialog boxes
• Powerful keyboard navigation in the file system browser (4.2)
• Files can be deleted and renamed, and new directories can be created from
  the file system browser

Customization

• Syntax highlighting modes are defined in XML files and new ones are very
  easy to write
• Many editor settings can be set on a global, per-mode, or per-file basis
• Fully customizable keyboard shortcuts
• Fully customizable tool bar and right-click context menu
• Macros to automate complex editing tasks can be written in
  the BeanShell scripting language

• Macros can be recorded from user actions

Extensibility

• Plugins can turn jEdit into a very advanced XML/HTML editor, or a full-fledged IDE, with compiler, code
  completion, context-sensitive help, debugging, visual diff, and many language-specific tools tightly integrated with the editor.
• More than 150 plugins are already available
  that add a variety of features to jEdit.
• The "Plugin manager" feature downloads and installs plugins (and updates) from within jEdit automatically.
• Plugin windows can either be shown as separate, top-level frames, or as
  "docked windows" inside the jEdit editor window

There you have it.Jedit, a fast, free, open source and cross-platform. This is the only editor I think can truly take the place of Homesite. If you have been reading the tutorials on eRuby this section rounds them out. Now you have a great text editor to code eRuby in and should have all the other pieces done. So it's time to get crackin' and create some first class web applications!

Happy Publishing!

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