I've been using jEdit for a few years now, and I still consider it the most versatile editor I've ever used. Unfortunately, while I don't have any problem with it's somewhat massive footprint on my desktop, I've recently run into issues using it as an editor in remote sessions. Even without any additional plugins it takes around ten seconds to load jEdit on an SSH session with X11 tunnelling on a 100Mbit network. While this is perfectly OK if I've got a lot of editing to do, it makes it very painful to use as a general purpose text editor for smaller jobs. At the moment, I use nedit, which loads faster, but doesn't have nice features like multiple line editing with rectangular selection, or jEdits far superior find/replace.

Is there any way I can significantly lighten jEdit so that I can use it as a replacement to nedit? Or if that's too much like trying to fit a war elephant in a dog kenel, then can anybody recommend a good companion editor to jEdit? A lighter editor built with jEdit Syntax Package for instance?