Wheew, no time to write as often since I got a php / mysql job here in L.A.

I never thought I’d switch to a freeware programmer’s editor from the very popular non-free UltraEdit. The way in which I switched came about when my supervisor pointed me out some indentation problems with the way that U.E. was doing it on the Unix platform at work. So I figured I’d better cooperate by installing it and using it, and “woh nellie”, I was hooked. When I got home, I installed it right away. I’ll still use UltraEdit for things like it’s color dialog box, but I won’t even need that when I end up finding the JEdit plugin that’ll do it. But definitely no more upgrading U.E.
Here are the reasons I switched to JEdit from UltraEdit:

1. I’m big on splitting windows and arranging them the way I like them. The way that JEdit does it is, is not like the familiar MDI way you’re used to in most Windows apps. It does its own way so that you just slide one single bar, and both sides go with it !! Hard to explain, so I’ll ditch this first reason and go to the next one. It’s just easy, plain easy and quick.
2. Like UltraEdit., it’s got:

Folding, bookmarks, macros and other features that I use in Ultraedit.

3.

I can upgrade JEdit free. And I’ll never have to look back at my last purchase invoice to see if I conform to the company’s requirement that I bought the last version of the program less than a year ago, like I would have to with UltraEdit if I stayed with U.E.! Nothing against Ian Mead’s paid upgrades. He’s got a full staff and they need to be paid.

4. The plugin architecture. It’s impressive. There are hundreds of plugins for JEdit. I really like the PHP Parser Plugin that points you to simple but hard to catch php syntax errors. ( I’ll have to write at least one plugin though as a gesture of thanks, and contribute this.. but need to re-open up one of my java books, because the plugins are written with it)
That’s it for now, but definitely enough to switch.

If anyone has info on how to do this in JEdit, I’d appreciate it:

- Be able to organize groups of files into projects so that I can choose to open a set group of files from a menu or something.

- A simple snippet utility so that I don’t have to type the code for an html table manually.

I just want to pull a menu with a “html-table snippet” and boom it’s there.


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