monline

The launcher script at /usr/share/jedit/jedit.sh has been screwed up in the Ubuntu Maverick package of jEdit. It does not contain the -reuseview switch which makes jEdit start only one instance in a session. The original DEB package available at jedit.org has a proper jedit.sh script. I wonder how could this happen? Was this switch removed intentionally?

By default the Mac OS X version of jEdit starts with 192MB of heap memory and the maximum size of text files that can be opened is limited by this parameter. In the jEdit forum there's a post on how to change the maximum size of Java heap memory of jEdit by altering the Info.plist file in the /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents directory. However this imposes a permanent change and jEdit will start with the increased heap memory pool every time (or you can make a copy of jEdit.app and launch that for large input files). Probably you just want to start jEdit with an increased heap memory to be able to open and process one single large text file.

I don't know how did this not get into jEdit's core. It's really a must have.

jEdit is one of the best cross-platform text editors out there (note the difference: it's just a text editor, not a word processor!) and certainly the choice of editor for many programmers. It's written in Java, so you can run it pretty much on all sorts of OSes (Windows, Mac, various Linux distros, OS/2, VMS ... just to name a few that it was already tested with). However on Mac OS X you'll run into the Alt/Option key problem pretty soon. By default the Mac version does not recognize Alt for use in shortcuts, which pretty much crapples the whole thing. Of course, there's an easy solution.