Hi WarrickF,

here's my setup for jEdit plugin development (although I'm a newbie too). I have a jEdit project in the workspace. This project basically contains the jEdit distribution folder. It should be java project and it doesn't have to contain any sourcefolders. It has jedit.jar on its buildpath. I have a java run configuration for this project with main class org.gjt.sp.jedit.jEdit. Since the project root folder is on top of the runtime classpath, jedit core will detect and load all plugins inside the jars directory (and of course plugins in .jedit/jars folder in your home).

Now, I have a separate project for my plugin. I'm using maven and my local maven repository to supply needed dependecies (through the m2eclipse plugin), but you can also just add all the required jars to buildpath. Sadly, I haven't found a way to make jEdit use the classes from the plugin project - it seems you have to package it into jar and deploy it into the jars directory inside the jEdit project. I'm using maven again to do the work - it shouldn't be hard to make ant do that too.

So, you end up with 2 run configurations: one build (maven / ant) that packages your plugin and deploys it and one jEdit launch configuration that bootstraps the editor and let you test the changes you've made. It takes me about 20 - 30 seconds (including automatic tests running during the plugin build) to propagate the changes into jEdit.

You should quit jEdit each time you build a new version of your plugin. BUT: you can use debuging! Both steping through your code and hot-replace of java classes works the same as in normal java project, as the debugger has hooks directly into the JRE - no need to changing the deployed jar file.

However, if you want to debug the jEdit core code, you have to compile it from sources yourself, as the distribution jar is compiled without debuging information.

Hope it helps,
Martin