jEdit for Mac

Lightweight Cocoa editor tailored for developers

jEdit is a feature-rich Cocoa text editor aimed at programmers. It combines ease of use with powerful capabilities such as comprehensive Unicode handling, automatic encoding detection, and a range of customization options. The editor is especially well-suited to people working with Java and XML thanks to robust regex searching, syntax highlighting, and automatic indentation.

Standout capabilities

• Extensive plugin ecosystem and an integrated Plugin Manager for discovering and installing add-ons.
• Built-in detection for character encodings so files open correctly across different systems.
• Support for embedding objects (images, QuickTime movies and external files) inside documents.
• Fully configurable keyboard shortcuts and macro support for streamlining repetitive tasks.
• Customizable syntax color schemes to help distinguish language elements at a glance.
• Fast, regex-based search tools for complex code and text manipulation.
• Automatic indentation and language-aware editing behavior to keep code tidy.

Ideal users

This editor is particularly appealing to Java and XML developers who need advanced search options and language-aware editing. Because of its extensibility, programmers who like to tailor their environment with plugins, macros and custom key bindings will find it especially useful.

Extending the editor

Plugins drastically expand functionality; you can install them directly from the built-in Plugin Manager or download them from the project site. Many extensions are free and cover a wide range of needs, from language support to workflow tools. Combined with customizable shortcuts and user-written macros, the editor can become a full-featured development environment at no cost.

Known limitations

• Startup can feel a bit slow on some systems.
• A few users have reported issues with the internal spell-checking component.

Recent fixes and performance tweaks

• Applied a patch to reduce unnecessary BufferUpdate notifications for temporary buffers, improving overall performance (contributed by Dale Anson).
• Resolved an issue where installers failed if the installation path contained exclamation marks (reported via SF.net).
• Corrected the RFC edit mode placement so it now matches the intended file patterns rather than being overridden by the more general text edit mode.
• Stopped logging an error when local API documentation is missing and instead link to the online docs to avoid noisy logs (reported via SF.net).
• Fixed a problem where status bar messages set by macros invoked from the Macro menu were being cleared immediately.
• Implemented a workaround for a Java 6 memory leak caused by sun.font.GlyphLayout caching that retained character arrays.
• Addressed a bug that sent contentRemoved events before marking buffers as dirty when text was deleted.
• Patched a memory leak that kept closed View and EditPane instances alive when using a global bufferset scope.
• Fixed a NullPointerException that could occur if an error was raised before the view finished loading.
• Corrected a beanshell load() exception that caused script loading to fail.
• Restored the Standalone TextArea build target so standalone builds succeed again.

If you want, I can format this into a changelog-style file or generate a condensed summary for release notes.