But almost.
While I am a huge fan of jEdit I am constantly keeping an eye on other text editors making up the ground on its functionality.
Being a developer a slick fully fuctional, light weight editor is key for me.
Yesterday I took another look at gEdit, and to my surprise it has acquired a new plugin which not only equals the functionality of jEdit’s column select, it far surpasses it.
This plugin, Multi-edit, not only allows you to edit in columns but actually gives the user multiple cursor marks so that they can edit in multiple places not just in straight lines. I don’t really want to duplicate what is explained on the website already so I won’t, and instead just post the link to the page right here.
What this means in the grand scheme of things is that gEdit is in reality one plugin away from being my editor of choice. What is stopping me at the moment? The excellent RecentBufferSwitcher plugin from jEdit that gives the user ctrl-tab switching to the most recently used files. Much of like how on most computers you can use alt-tab to circle through the most recently used applications.
And you may ask why I am looking for another editor when jEdit does all that I want, well java! Not the programming language itself (although that doesn’t help its cause) but the fact that jEdit (hence the j in jEdit) relies on the Java jvm in order to run. This has caused me a few problems in the past, not to mention the fact that it means that I have to install another piece of software just to use jEdit. Whereas gEdit is a native application and written in C and Python, meaning quick starts (depending on how many/few plugins you have installed and enabled), and no problems that I used to have with java applications running under compiz.
So seeing as it is just one plugin away from satisfying all my needs, I may take a stab at RecentBufferSwitcher functionality, but I am not making any promises. In fact I would even say that if someone were to volunteer their time duplicating the ctrl-tab functinality into gEdit I would pay them to do it. Something like 50 euros, I think it is a small cost for something that is so key to my job.
Anyway, jEdit here today, maybe gone tomorrow.
