jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. To download, install, and set up jEdit as quickly and painlessly as possible, go to the Quick Start page.

While jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use, it is released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0.

The jEdit core, together with a large collection of plugins is maintained by a world-wide developer team.

Some of jEdit's features include:

* Written in Java, so it runs on Mac OS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows.
* Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Dozens of macros and plugins available.
* Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the "plugin manager" feature.
* Auto indent, and syntax highlighting for more than 130 languages.
* Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode.
* Folding for selectively hiding regions of text.
* Word wrap.
* Highly configurable and customizable.
* Every other feature, both basic and advanced, you would expect to find in a text editor. See the Features page for a full list.

Features:

General

* Combines the best functionality of Unix, Windows and MacOS text editors.
* Runs on any operating system with a Java 2 version 1.3 or higher virtual machine - this includes MacOS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows.
* Efficient keyboard shortcuts for everything
* Comprehensive online help
* Unlimited undo/redo
* Copy and paste with an unlimited number of clipboards (known as "registers")
* Register contents are saved across editing sessions (4.2)
* "Kill ring" automatically remembers previously deleted text (4.2)
* Rich set of keyboard commands for manipulating entire words, lines and paragraphs at a time
* "Markers" for remembering positions in files to return to later
* Marker locations are saved across editing sessions
* Any number of editor windows may be open, each window may be split into several areas, each area can view a different file. Alternatively, different locations in one file can be viewed in more than one area
* Multiple open windows and split windows are remembered between editing sessions (4.2)
* Rectangular selection
* Multiple selection (sometimes known as "discontinuous" or "additive" selection) for manipulating several chunks of text at once
* Word wrap

Source Code Editing

* Intelligent bracket matching skips quoted literals and comments
* Auto indent
* Commands for shifting the indent left and right
* Commands for commenting out code
* Soft tabs option
* Abbreviations
* Folding, with two fold modes: indent-based, and explicit (where the buffer is parsed for "{{{" and "}}}")

Search and Replace

* Both literal and regular expression search and replace supported
* Multiple file search and replace; search in either the current file, all open files, or all files in a directory
* "HyperSearch" option to show all found matches in a list
* Reverse search supported
* Incremental search supported
* Option to replace occurrences of a regular expression with the return value of a BeanShell script. As far as I know, no other text editor offers comparable functionality!

File Management

* Any number of files can be opened at once
* Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and UTF16
* Automatic detection of several character encodings (4.2)
* Automatic compression and decompression of GZipped (.gz) files
* Any character encoding supported by Java can be used to load and save files
* Multi-threaded I/O system supports pluggable "virtual file systems" for listing directories and loading files:
o FTP plugin adds support for loading and saving files on FTP servers