A new theme, "Binary", is available for your inspection and use if you are a registered member of jEdit Community. It is adapted from the theme of the same name created by Dezina and released for public use. This has potential as our signature "default" theme. What do you think?

To do this, you will need the Windows Script Host, which is installed on most versions of Windows. The latest version, Windows Script Host 5.6, is available by download from Microsoft's MSDN web site. The most recent version compatible with Windows 95 is Windows Script Host 5.5. You will also need the script launch_same_ie.js, available in the Downloads section.

jEdit 4.0 development is moving along well. I have recently started writing a new document model, which will bring performance and memory usage improvements. There are also a lot of UI changes that improve the general jEdit experience. I plan on releasing a '4.0pre0 snapshot' in maybe a week's time; this will not be an official release, but rather something that plugin developers and daring users can try out. Me and John Gellene will then start updating the documentation, and when that is done, I will release 4.0pre1.

Originally written by Dirk Moebius and revised by Sergey Udaltsov, the Sessions plugin maintains lists of open files as workspaces called "sessions". It provides functions for creating, naming, maintaining and loading sessions.

• Dump_Project_File_Names.bsh writes a list of files in current view of the Project Viewer plugin to a new buffer.


• Edit_jEdit_Property.bsh displays a dialog for viewing and editing individual jEdit properties, including properties set by plugins and custom properties set by users.


• Make_Extra_Console.bsh creates a separate instance of the Console plugin interface in its own frame window. This allows you to run and view output from separate external processes from within jEdit.

jEdit news will no longer be posted on the SourceForge project page. Now, everything will be posted on the community site, and an HTML news feed will be incorporated into the jEdit home page.

What should be our next survey? We can even have more than one at the same time. Nominate a question by adding a comment to this article.

To use the article feed, simply insert the following PHP code on your web page:

<?php
readfile ("http://community.jedit.org/get_articles.php?
req=showarticles&limit=10&flat=1&summaries=1");
?>

Note that the readfile statement should span only a single line.

The first parameter is mandatory, the other are show at their default values. The limit parameter specifies how many articles will be displayed, beginning with the most recent. The flat parameter is a boolean that determines whether the article's author and publication date will be show on the same line as the title. The summaries parameter determines whether the first paragraph of the article will be displayed along with the title, author and publication date.

The Tags plugin, created by Kenrick Drew, allows you to jump to the definition of a specific language object or "tag" using tag index files. The index files are created by the ctags program available for both Windows and UNIX-based systems. You can obtain a robust version of ctags from the Exuberant C Tags project site.

The author of JMonkey, Ashley Williams, describes this new plugin as follows:

The JMonkey plugin is a collection of file system helpers, known as JMonkeys. There are currently two JMonkeys available:

An online version of the User's Guide for the current "stable" version of jEdit, version 3.2.2, is now available on the jEdit Community web site. This is the same version of the User's Guide distributed with the current release of JEdit. Each page of the guide is separately displayed and can be presented in a printer-friendly format by clicking on the printer icon in the upper-right corner of the page's center column. We hope you find this facility useful.

Thanks to Lionel Fiol for the "Made with jEdit" button logo that now appears at the bottom of our pages. Other contributions of graphics, or suggestions about themes for the jEdit Community site as a whole, are very welcome.

We've added a few more features to close out the first week of jEdit Community's operations.

The left column of blocks now includes a listing of the five most recently posted downloads and web links. Tooltips provide a summary of the material. The download links take you directly to the our full information page for the download item. The web links open the linked page in a new browser window.

There are two new themes available, both with Macromedia Flash graphics and music (or sound effects, depending on your taste). The WebDesignHQ_FlashGrey and WebDesignHQ_FlashRed themes were created and made available by WebDesignHq.com. The themes run on Internet Explorer and versions of Netscape Navigator prior to version 6. The Mozilla codebase (also used by Netscape 6) does not support the scripting methods available in prior Netscape versions that are used by the themes' embedded Macromedia Flash Player.

Over the weekend jEdit Community registered its 50th member, after only four days in operation! Thanks to all of you for your interest and support.

I want to emphasize that membership information is not distributed to anyone and is used only for purposes of jEdit Community: password maintenance and the occassional annoucement on matters dealing directly with jEdit or the site itself. You need only supply a user name and a valid email address. Please consider becoming a member if you have not done so already.

While Microsoft's support for Java seems to range from lukewarm to non-existent, it continues to make available the Microsoft SDK for Java 4.0 for download. It includes two application launchers, jview.exe and wjview.exe. They operate like java.exe and javaw.exe, although command-line syntax differs substantially. The Java virtual machine included in the package reports its java.version property as 1.1.4. Version 3.2.2 of jEdit will run in Microsoft's virtual machine if you place the Swing classes in its classpath.

It would be useful to collect in one place any bugs or other problems jEdit users have with different combinations of operating systems, JDK's and keyboards for various languages. There are a number of posts on the mailing lists but it would be good to get current experience. If you have some combination to report on, leave a short comment to this article from which other users can get guidance.

The Downloads section of jEditCommunity is available as a repository for beta or development versions of plugins that are not ready for posting on jEdit's Plugin Central. You can either post a download link or send an email message attaching a jar archive file. If the download is a new plugin, a short description of its capabilities will obviously be helpful.

The situation differs among the major browsers. Internet Explorer, even as recently as version 6.0, will work with self-signed certificates under Microsoft's JVM. However, Netscape, Mozilla and other browsers using Sun's Java Plugin-In have stricter security requirements. Beginning with JDK 1.3.1, a security certificate will not work without a valid root Certificate Authority. It appears there is no way to circumvent this requirement, even if the user were willing to run an untrusted applet plugin. Since an IRC applet on the jEdit Community site would have to access the Internet to communicate with an IRC server, security limitations are triggered.

We have opened an IRC channel for jEdit users where you can discuss general jEdit issues or simply enjoy yourself. Feel free to join #jedit on irc.openprojects.net (port 6667).

You might also want to install the IRC plugin for jEdit which allows for in-place discussion right within your favorite editor! Visit jEdit Plugin Central to learn how to install it.

The PostNuke web portal system uses "themes" to provide options for layout and presentation of the site's content. The jEdit Community site now has the "Slate" theme as an alternative to the default "PostNuke" and "ExtraLite" themes. Rendered largely in shades of dark and darker blue, the Slate theme is based on the PostNuke theme of the same name created by PixelMayhem (formerly known as Somara), which has kindly released its creation for public use.

If you are a registered member of jEdit Community, you can specify the Slate theme and other display options in the Your Account section of the site.

The jEdit Community site is being featured on the home page of the PostNuke project as a new site adopting the web portal system. We hope that this will give PostNuke users an opportunity to learn more about jEdit.