jEdit

jEdit is an enormously popular text editor designed for programmers.

jEdit's strengths lie in it's simplicity, power and wide support of Unicode, Text Encoding Sniffer, Customizable Syntax Coloring, Fully Customizable Key Bindings, Object Embedding (image, Quicktime Movie and files) and much more. It's of particular appeal to those working with Java and XML due to a powerful search engine for regular expressions, syntax highlighting and auto-indentation.

If jEdit doesn't provide everything that you need then there's a good chance that the large database of plugins will. You can download these via the Plug-in Editor within jEdit or directly from the developer site and they include a huge number of free enhancements that make jEdit even better.

“jEdit has become so widely used by developers that it must pack quite a punch”

Features:

• Combines the best functionality of Unix, Windows and MacOS text editors.
• Runs on any operating system with a Java 2 version 1.3 or higher virtual machine – this includes MacOS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows.
• Efficient keyboard shortcuts for everything.
• Comprehensive online help.
• Unlimited undo/redo.
• Copy and paste with an unlimited number of clipboards (known as "registers")
• Register contents are saved across editing sessions (4.2)
• "Kill ring" automatically remembers previously deleted text (4.2)
• Rich set of keyboard commands for manipulating entire words, lines and paragraphs at a time.
• "Markers" for remembering positions in files to return to later.
• Marker locations are saved across editing sessions.
• Any number of editor windows may be open, each window may be split into several areas, each area can view a different file. Alternatively, different locations in one file can be viewed in more than one area.
• Multiple open windows and split windows are remembered between editing sessions (4.2)
• Rectangular selection.
• Multiple selection (sometimes known as "discontinuous" or "additive" selection) for manipulating several chunks of text at once.
• Word wrap.

Source Code Editing:

• Intelligent bracket matching skips quoted literals and comments.
• Auto indent.
• Commands for shifting the indent left and right.
• Commands for commenting out code.
• Soft tabs option.
• Abbreviations.
• Folding, with two fold modes: indent-based, and explicit (where the buffer is parsed for "{{{" and "}}}")

Search and Replace:

• Both literal and regular expression search and replace supported.
• Multiple file search and replace; search in either the current file, all open files, or all files in a directory.
• "HyperSearch" option to show all found matches in a list.
• Reverse search supported.
• Incremental search supported.
• Option to replace occurrences of a regular expression with the return value of a BeanShell script. As far as I know, no other text editor offers comparable functionality!.

File Management:

• Any number of files can be opened at once.
• Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and UTF16
• Automatic detection of several character encodings (4.2)
• Automatic compression and decompression of GZipped (.gz) files.
• Any character encoding supported by Java can be used to load and save files.
• Multi-threaded I/O system supports pluggable "virtual file systems" for listing. directories and loading files:
  • FTP plugin adds support for loading and saving files on FTP servers.
  • Archive plugin adds read-only support for loading files from ZIP and TAR archives.
• Custom file system browser component used in open and save dialog boxes.
• Powerful keyboard navigation in the file system browser (4.2)
• Files can be deleted and renamed, and new directories can be created from. the file system browser.

Customization

• Syntax highlighting modes are defined in XML files and new ones are very easy to write.
• Many editor settings can be set on a global, per-mode, or per-file basis.
• Fully customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Fully customizable tool bar and right-click context menu.
• Macros to automate complex editing tasks can be written in the BeanShell scripting language.
• Macros can be recorded from user actions.

Extensibility:

• Plugins can turn jEdit into a very advanced XML/HTML editor, or a full-fledged IDE, with compiler, code completion, context-sensitive help, debugging, visual diff, and many language-specific tools tightly integrated with the editor.
• More than 150 plugins are already available that add a variety of features to jEdit.
• The "Plugin manager" feature downloads and installs plugins (and updates) from within jEdit automatically.
• Plugin windows can either be shown as separate, top-level frames, or as "docked windows" inside the jEdit editor window.

jEdit – 130 file types supported

Plugins:
Plugins for jEdit can be obtained HERE

Installation instructions:
Installation instructions for windows are available HERE

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OS Requirements:

Win XP/Vista/Win 7