I have now found the buffer switcher plugins and am using SwitchBuffer. SwitchBuffer handles the scroll keys properly without changing buffers for each scroll. It even wraps around the list - all things that the default bufferswitcher should really do out of the box.

I'm still looking for a buffer list sorted by time of last switch. Will investigate if jEdit maintains this information for buffers.

the default buffer switcher does accept one or two letters as input and will jump to the files starting with that letter. That makes it almost usable. It looks like default behaviour that it inherits from JComboBox and probably should be documented in the buffer switcher help.

I'm running jEdit on a netbook with a touch pad that I'm always hitting accidentally. I have to switch the touch pad off to run jEdit sanely.

So I use the buffer switcher with the scroll keys not the mouse. Scrolling the buffer selector with the keys actually switches buffers but that doesn't save any keystrokes because I have to hit esc or enter to clear the buffer switcher. Selecting the buffer on a big XML file can be noticeably slow since it seems to trigger considerable parsing. ctrl+` (toggle two last buffers) also thinks the previous file I edited was the last one I scrolled through before selecting a file to edit - making ctrl+` next to useless. Using the mouse to scroll the buffer selector only selects the file after I hit enter, avoids unneeded parsing and allows ctrl+` to work as designed.

My first requirement is really that using scroll keys in the buffer switcher list not select files. Or is that a defect? Is there a good reason for it?