jEdit: Basic Setting of My Favourite Text Editor

Not much people knows jEdit is a great tools, most of I know it can compete with existing commercial and free Text Editor (or even Programmer's Editor), and the great thing it is multiplatform and open source, many people give contribution on jEdit.

I'll introduce best practice of using jEdit, it based on my needs as software developer.

You can download jEdit on www.jedit.org. Get the jEdit distribution and install it.
Start the jEdit, and you will see splash screen like this



Some platform such windows has jEdit server, it runs on the background, so there is no need to do initialize things again and when you need to open jEdit, it will start quicker.

This are the main screen



Since version version 4.3 pre 14 it has new splash screen and little fancy icons.
Straight to the point, what do programmers usually need is?

1. Line numbers
2. Indentations
3. Shortcut to do things

Line numbers
To show line numbers, simply by click on menu bar: "Utilities -> Global Options..."
Alternative of this you can click "Global Options..." on the toolbar.
Select "gutter" on the left tree and check the "Line numbering" on the right view.

Indentations
Indentation has been set by default, but it use 8 as tab and indent width. I'm not conform with this options and usually use 4 as tab and indent width . On the same "Global Options..." dialog, select "Editing" on the left tree. Fill all the desirable value.

Shortcut
Programmers need to do things fast. So this are list of some usefull shortcut

• Open... (ctrl + o)
• New (ctrl + n), it will create new editor of new buffer. Buffer is just like tab.
• Show Buffer Switcher (alt + back_quote), it just open the combo box, you can do this by clicking on the Buffer Switcher.
• Go to Next Buffer (ctrl + page_down)
• Go to Previous Buffer (ctrl + page_up)
  
• Find... (ctrl + f)
• Find next (ctrl + g)
• Incremental search (ctrl + comma)
• Hypersearch (ctrl + period), this will show list of all occurrence word on different view
• Incremental search for selected word (alt + comma)
• Hypersearch for selected word (alt + period), this will show list of all occurrence word on different view

Well, start using the free and powerful jEdit. It has many other functionality and you can make it more powerful by using plugins.