jEdit 5.6

jEdit is a programmer’s tool and development environment. In this respect, it is good to know that it supports a wide array of programming languages, including XML, HTML, Python, Perl and PHP. Luckily, it is accompanied with an excellent user guide that allows you to benefit from all its valuable features.

The editor has an intuitive interface, which gives you the chance of working on various files simultaneously. Likewise, it helps you focus on writing code by supporting code coloring and folding as well as automatic indentation. Another well-appreciated feature is the possibility of copying and pasting with the help of multiple clipboard. Similarly, it lets you make multiple selections of discontinuous pieces of text in a single operation.

One of the best advantages of jEdit is its extensible plugin architecture, which allows adding new functionalities without much effort. For this purpose, there is fortunately a manager to download and install plugins. In this respect, although it is true that this application does not come with all the features available from more complete IDEs, its support of plugins certainly lets you turn it into a more powerful editor by incorporating code completion, context-sensitive help and debugging capabilities.

All in all, jEdit can become an excellent tool in the hands of programmers, who can customize it to their needs by installing plugins. It is a Java-based application, which provides it with the advantage of being cross-platform; however, this may also cause slow startups. The product and its supported plugins are opensource and constantly developed by an enthusiastic community of developers.