When it comes to open source text editors, it’s hard to find a programmer who hasn’t heard of jEdit. Under development for more than 10 years, it’s a perennial favorite of developers, writers, bloggers, and casual users alike. As Project Leader Björn “Vampire” Kautler succinctly puts it, “It is simply is the best text editor out there, that can be easily customized and extended to eternity and is cross-platform. It supports syntax highlighting of over 200 languages.”
Unlike many of today’s open source projects, jEdit forgoes fancy collaboration tools and simply coordinates what needs to get done via mailing lists. That makes it dead-simple to attract contributors who can just sign up for a list or check out the Patches Tracker, and get to work on improving an already fantastic text editing tool. “If someone proves as active and submitting good stuff, he may get allowance to commit directly,” says Kautler.
jEdit has been chosen as October’s Project of the Month, so if you want to know more about this project and the hard-working team behind it, have at look at its feature page dedicated to all things jEdit. Wondering what other projects we’ve highlighted this year? Here’s the whole list — give it a look and find out more about what’s kept some of the FOSS community’s developers busy for more than a decade.