Hi elberry, thanks for you helpful hints, the proverb at the foot of your email is lovely.

I will look for the plugin you mentioned and since my post I discovered the plugins system and got myself a console window, which works much like eclipse. Afterwards I realised it was a bit naive of me to think that jEdit should come with compilation tools built in. NOt very naive perhaps, but I suppose it is designed as a general purpose editor and as such, doesn't come with too many assumption about what you want to do with it.

I have also discovered there are many ways of altering jEdits sombre layout. The ocnventional way with a new icon theme, like this one:

http://www.webkitchen.cz/tmp/jedit-clearlooks.png

Which can be downloaded in a thrice from here:

http://community.jedit.org/?q=taxonomy/page/or/23

It only needs to be unzipped in the right directory to work.

Or you can use a more elaborate scheme from JGoodies, which looks like this:

http://vsbabu.org/mt/archives/images/jedit14_jgoodies122_winxp.html

From here:

http://vsbabu.org/mt/archives/2004/11/20/jedit_with_jgoodies.html

Or NimROD:

http://personales.ya.com/nimrod/img/sc12.jpg

From here:

http://personales.ya.com/nimrod/index-en.html

Enjoy!