[ jEdit-devel ] Need a good text editor

[Aaron D. <di...@he...>]

Hello,

I'm looking for a better editor component for my project ePen
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/epen/). My needs:

- Open as many editor panes as necessary side-by-side.

- On-line spell checking as you type

- Tooltips for errors text

- Highlight all words that read the same as the current selection

- Stack multiple error messages on top of each other for every word
(like "This word was repeated 15 times", "Slang", "Passive voice")

- Real time searching

- Being able to embed images would be a bonus but I can live with
text-links (I don't believe in WYSIWYG).

I played a bit with SWT's StyledText but especially the styling of text
gives me some headaches.

So I'm willing to give jEdit a try now. Some questions:

- Is it correct that the current TextPane can't handle embedded objects?
Do you think that's possible to implement or is that a sore spot?

- Can I update the styles asynchronously? Spell checking is slow; I plan
to run this in a background task starting with the current line, then
the first line on the screen and then the whole text. Is there an
example how I can add styles to the text from a background task?

- Is it possible to stack text styles in jEdit?

I had a superficial look at the sources. If I find that jEdit can be
extended to meet my demands, I'm willing to code what I need.

- Would it be possible to move the code into a directory src/? I'm
working with unit tests and I don't want to mix them with the production
code.

- I noticed that all text actions are methods in the TextArea class.
What do you think about creating actions for them?

- There is a file "textarea.actions.xml". This sounds like a perfect
place to use Java annotations. Is there a reason why you use an XML file
for this?

- I need the editor to run on SWT. What would you say if I started to
turn the rendering code into an abstraction layer so jEdit can be used
both on Swing and SWT?

Regards,

-- 
Aaron "Optimizer" Digulla a.k.a. Philmann Dark
"It's not the universe that's limited, it's our imagination.
Follow me and I'll show you something beyond the limits."
http://blog.pdark.de/