Well Armed

jEdit

One of my pet peeves about GUI text editors is that they are rarely able to handle column manipulation – that is, the ability to cut/copy/paste text in a column fashion. For many years I used NEdit, which has this ability, and I used it frequently. However, NEdit had not been updated in a while, and I had problems with it crashing, so I started looking for a new editor. The first feature I looked for was the ability to perform column manipulation. JEdit [29]was the first, but not the only, editor I found that could do this.

JEdit is written in Java, so it runs on any OS with Java support. It has a large number of features desired in a text editor, including:

• Syntax highlighting for more than 200 languages
• Split-screen mode
• Code folding
• Markers
• Customizable
• Macros
• >150 plugins
• Column manipulation (cut/copy/paste)

Plugins allow jEdit (Figure 10) to behave as a lightweight IDE.

Figure 10: jEdit 1.7.0 on Windows 10.

JuffEd

Perhaps a lesser known editor is JuffEd [30] (Figure 11), which is nevertheless a powerful cross-platform text editor. As with two other editors in this review, JuffEd uses Scintilla for the editor component.

Figure 11: JuffEd 0.8.1 on Windows 10.

JuffEd has a very large feature set that is comparable to the most advanced editors:

• Plugins for syntax highlighting for 20+ languages
• Code folding
• Braces matching
• Cross-platform
• Line numbers
• Markers
• Multilingual support

Take a look at JuffEd – it is pretty nifty.

Kate

KDE Advanced Text Editor (Kate) [31] is part of the KDE Software Compilation [32] and is considered the KDE text editor. It has been around a fairly long time starting with KDE 2.2 in 2001.

Kate has many of the features of a classic editor, including syntax highlighting (based on file extensions), code folding [33], layouts that can be customized, regular expression support, and more. If you haven't used code folding before, you should try it out; it can be a useful feature in long code files. You can take a section of code and "fold" it so that it is hidden from view. When you "unfold," the section of code becomes visible.

Kate (Figure 12) also allows you to split the screen, so you can see two parts of the file at the same time (always a useful feature). On the left-hand side, Kate maintains a list of files that are being edited, so you can switch back and forth.

Figure 12: Kate 3.3.4 on CentOS 6.8 with KDE.