Thread

Not Jedit X, but the Java-based jEdit. I’ve been a long-time user of Textmate, and really love most everything about it, but it’s missing some features I want like split view and column indicators, and it’s undo implementation can get really annoying. On top of that development seems to have stagnated. There have been a couple minor updates in the past year+.

After trying out other editors, I ended up with jEdit. It’s UI is clunky in areas, but it can be “prettified” a bit with plugins. Plugins can also add a lot of great functionality. If I could marry jEdit’s text editor with Textmate’s UI and bundles, I’d be a very happy camper.

Since I can’t do that, I’m trying to make do with jEdit’s quirks. One of those major quirks is not being able to work with FTP clients like Transmit. In Transmit, when I’m viewing files on a remote server, I can either doubleclick or right-click and select ‘Edit With’ to edit that file with an external editor. With apps like Textmate, BBEdit and so on, I can set them as a default editor. When I doubleclick a file, it opens that file in Textmate. When I try to set jEdit as my default editor and doublelick a file, it opens jEdit, but it doesn’t actually open the file in jEdit for me to edit. In other words, jEdit gets the focus, but no new window is opened with the file I want to edit. Has anyone figured out a solution for this?

What other jEdit tips/tricks do you have to share?

I just solved the major issue I had with jEdit. The Mac OS plugin wasn’t loading on startup. Once I enabled that, I was able to open a remote file in jEdit.

That led to another issue though where Transmit wouldn’t recognize the saved changes to a file. jEdit automatically makes a backup of whatever file you’re editing. It first saves the original to a backup, and then copies that overwriting the original. By doing it this way, Transmit never sees the original get saved for some reason. I wrote Panic about this, and it’s a known issue. A similar thing happens with emacs/Aquamacs.

I eventually got it working though. Under Global Options -> Saving & Backup, change Max Number of Backups from 1 to 0. Once I changed that, Transmit sees the changes and uploads it to the server.

I’ve made a jEdit language mode for EE that works pretty good, at least as good as my Textmate bundle. The jEdit mode is just for syntax highlighting though. No snippets. No doc lookups.

The mode keeps HTML, JS, CSS and PHP styled correctly as well, so nothing should look weird. Just like my Textmate bundle, EE tags inside of strings (e.g. “test-{entry_id}”) don’t get highlighted correctly. I’m looking into ways of fixing this.

I’ve attached a screenshot for those who are interested.

You can download it here.