RE: [ jEdit-users ] jEdit 4.0pre1 now available

[John G. <jge...@ny...>]

One thing I noticed running 4.0pre1 today on Windows 2000 SP2, JDK
1.4beta-3, is that the text area coloring problem does not occur if "Smooth
text" is switched on in Global Options, Text Area.  The text is actually too
blurry in my installation when it is switched on (even with "Fractional font
metrics" switched on as well), but this may give a clue as to why the text
area colors below the editing caret are all wrong under JDK 1.4 when "Smooth
text" is turned off.  Outside the text area, the rest of the GUI is plainly
better looking under JDK 1.4.

The flashing console window that occurs when calling command line
executables from System shell has not been fixed in beta3 (despite the
report that Sun has fixed the bug).  I ran a simple "dir" in the System
shell and, as in the past, the call to Runtime.exec() create a visible
native console window while the process was running. Prefixing the command
with the jcmd utility stopped the flashing window, just as under prior JDK
versions.

Some quick statistics on system memory usage:

No open files, full (27) set of plugins (FileSystem Browser and Console
visible at startup): just under 29MB of system memory.  After opening one
500 line source code file, and a lot of scrolling up and down, system memory
bounces around but does not exceed 30.5MB.  Java heap memory reports as
about 5MB.

Then I change the -settings directory so that only the Firewall and Check
jEdit Version plugins are loaded.  The program starts up quite fast (on a
600MB Pentium III, 256MB memory).  Initial system memory is just over 22MB.
Loading the same 500 line file takes system memory up to 24MB.  Java heap
memory stays around 4MB.  After I minimized and immediately restored the
frame, system memory stayed at around 15MB.

This last figure is very reasonable for an IDE (although one has to
acknowledge that the IDE elements were largely absent because there were
almost no plugins loaded).  It seems the ultimate goal for jEdit's resource
requirements might be some combination of loading and unloading plugins on
demand and trying to coax the VM not to hoard system resources.  With the
new document model, I think 4.0 is taking a big step in the right direction.

John