jEdit

Download portable jEdit 4.3.1 DMG

Any craftsman gets attached to the tools he uses – or at least I do, being the geek I am. I first appreciate the tool for its features but I come to love it for what it allows me to do and how I feel when I’m using it. I love Flemish White paint and extra long flat bristle brushes too. Like many web designers (that’s what we called ourselves back in 1998), I used Macromedia Dreamweaver. Coming from a PageMaker background, it seemed to have a similar interface and promised to hide the ugly HTML from me and let me get to the real work of design; remember, I was a designer. These were the days of incompatible DOMs (Document Object Models). Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer were locked in battle and web designers like myself were caught in the crossfire trying to code for both. I quickly found that I spent a lot of time in the code window of Dreamweaver so I looked at other text editors. Allaire HomeSite was a favorite for awhile because I liked its code folding. I also tried Edit++, Crimson Editor, a dozen others, and more recently TextMate. The unassuming Java based jEdit always wins. I’m no zealot about it; if you like something else, that’s fine. I’ve made some modifications to jEdit to make it portable on MacOS X for USB drives and such and packaged it up with settings and plugins that I find useful.

Here are the changes I made:

• Opened the jEdit application bundle (control-click the jEdit.app -> Show Package Contents)
• Created a folder in there called “settings” with contents from my settings folder in ~/Library/jEdit
• Opened the file Info.plist and added this code:
  

  <key>WorkingDirectory</key>
        <string>$APP_PACKAGE</string>
  <key>VMOptions</key>
        <string>-Xmx192M -Duser.home=./Contents</string>
  <key>Arguments</key>
        <string>-background -settings=settings</string>