I am new to JEdit and really like it! The one thing I wanted to change right away was that there is support for function highlighting but not for highlighting common Java classes, which I am used to.

EditPlus has 1800 such keywords in a plain text file so it was pretty easy to import them into jEdit's java.xml file.

I wrote up a quick explanation and posted the relevant files here:
"http://www.praximos.com/jedit"

Thanks to everyone who works on jEdit, this is an awesome program!

The org.gjt.sp.jedit.syntax package in the CVS can now be used in other programs. You can find preliminary documentation by generating javadocs from the latest source. More information will be added to the javadocs over time.

You need to use instead the iso-8859-15 character set, which is a modification of iso-8859-1 that includes the Euro sign and some Finnish and French characters. The Euro sign represents character value 0xA4 in this 8-bit set.

There is a new addition to the downloads area, euro.bsh, that can be used as a startup script to provide macro methods to help you with your use of the Euro. The methods let you insert a Euro currency character, change the current buffer's encoding to iso-8859-15, and open a file with that encoding.

A few users have asked about the mechanics of submitting a macro script to our Downloads area. The easiest way to do this is to go to the Add download page of the Downloads area and fill out the form. If you want to upload your macro to the jEdit Community server instead of supplying your own link, leave the URL empty and send your source file as an email attachment to John Gellene. Now you have no excuse, so let's see your macros!

First, I decided that I would do without the help documentation and the "Tip of the day" feature. Opening jedit.jar with a zip file utility, I removed all of the files in the /doc directory and all of the HTML tip files. The resulting jedit.jar shrunk to 986KB. Not bad for a start.

Next, I looked at the edit modes in the /modes directory. What would I really need on the road? I narrowed the selection down to the following: beanshell, c, cplusplus, html, java, javascript, perl, php, python, text, xml and xsl. The largest price paid was for the php mode: the file was 97KB, over four times the size of the next largest. Maybe someday we'll have a php-lite mode, but I decided to keep it in.

• Under jEdit 3.2.2 and prior versions, the QuickNotepad plugin had a separate class, QuickNotepadDockable, implementing the DockableWindow interface. The class's methods delegated actions to the plugin's top-level visible component, a class derived from JPanel called QuickNotepad. The DockableWindow interface is deprecated in jEdit 4.0, so this class was eliminated. If the top-level component had implemented the DockableWindow interface, it would have been necessary to remove the implements statement and eliminate the getName() and getComponent() methods of that in the plugin class (unless, of course, the plugin itself requires them).

Like nearly every software project, jEdit is built from its source code using what is called a "make" or "makefile" system. These terms come from the original "make" utility that was created for use on the UNIX operating system; there are now a variety of makefile utilities available for all operating systems. Besides the source code and related resources, a makefile system has two main elements. The first is a "makefile", a plain text file that specifies the steps necessary to build the application, such as the invocation of a compiler, an object code linker or an archiving program. The makefile also describes the dependencies among the final product, intermediate files and the underlying source code. This file will be written in a special format designed to satisfy the requirements of the second major element, the "make" utility.