If SWT performance is better that would be a plus, but I don't think jEdit's GUI is slow. Furthermore, I've heard SWT performance is crummy on OS X and Linux -- though it may have improved. The original post is vague. What is "inconsistent" about jEdit's GUI that switching to another toolkit would solve, and what about SWT is more "accomodative" than Swing? If there are things that are confusing or could be better organized, surely they could be changed without adopting a different GUI toolkit.

I've found that SWT performance is fine under Linux; at least Eclipse 'seems' much more responsive then any of the swing applications that I've used (or written code for).

I just took a look at jEdit, and for me the biggest barrier to switching is the swing GUI. The editor seems mature, I know java so I can extend it without playing with lisp expressions, and there are a lot of really cool looking plugins. On the other hand, the fonts are not anti-aliased, and it looks like something out of Gnome 1.0 when I switch it into GTK+ mode. I wouldn't mind Swing so much if it would make use of the native system's font renderer, or at least turn on anti-aliasing by default.

I know this whole thing is superficial, but I'm really tired of looking at emacs's jagged, eye-strain inducing fonts (to the point of running it it in gnome's terminal emulator sometimes). I don't switch text editors very often, and I'd rather not spend the next n years looking at ugly fonts.

At least under Linux, Swing's look and feel has fallen behind the times. Think 'Windows 3.1 app on Windows 95'. From what I've seen of Swing under Windows, it's probably the same case there, but it could have been improved since the last time I checked.

I think these problems are what the original poster meant with the terms 'inconsitent' and wanting a UI that's more "accomodative" than Swing.

However, before you port to AWT, consider turning on Swing's font-antialiaser, setting the look and feel to the native one and comparing the look and feel of jEdit with native programs on the popular operating systems. It's unlikely to look as good as the toolkit provided by the OS, but it will probably be a huge step forward. The biggest drawback is that the last time I looked into swing's font anti-aliaser it was virtually impossible to use. Maybe that's been fixed, or maybe there's a third party library that "just works". It's also possible that swingWT has improved over the last few months...

That's my two cents.

Hmmm, I've never noticed jaggedness or fuzziness in text in jEdit on Windows 2000. For either java 1.4 and 1.5.

Have you toyed with the Smooth Text and Fractional Font metrics options under Global options, Text Area?

Haven't run it on Linux for many months, so can't compare....