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After some frustration with other text editors, I recently discovered jEdit. It seems like a light-weight editor that has so many plugins that it could be grown to be a full IDE. I especially like how it handles SQL. I've found quite a few people that happily converted from Emacs to jEdit. But have yet to find people that converted from an IDE.

I'm not trying to argue which is the best IDE. I just want to know if people are actively using jEdit as an IDE and how it compares to other IDE's they've used. I have been trying to get jEdit to be an IDE but it appears to take quite a bit of configuration and I'm concerned it will just be a waste of time.

jlf
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User1
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Based on this I think you can: Using jedit as an IDE

Community
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Abdullah Jibaly
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  • Thanks for the link. Actually that was the question that prompted this question. That's a lot of plugins and there are still things missing (like intellisense). There are so many tweaks that I have done and I just want to know if I'll have something usable in the end. – User1 Jan 12 '11 at 20:48
  • All the major Java IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans, Idea) are really good, you'll probably get a lot more out of them if you want a true IDE. – Abdullah Jibaly Jan 12 '11 at 21:14
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I believe that the tool that was created to do specific task shall be preferred over tool which has wider range of use. (in general)
So, in case of jEdit - it is great, but it is used more as good text editor. And full-scale IDEs (like NetBeans) are designed to do only one task - programming, thus they are better at it. And I do not know of any project which uses jEdit as IDE. (Basically, there are two big groups of projects - those that still use Notepad or gedit to do coding, and those that use "normal" IDEs, so jEdit lies in the middle and is never used)

Rogach
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The key question is "IDE for what?"

The big IDEs (Netbeans, IntelliJ, Eclipse) support certain mainstream languages very well, but starting your own specific support for some small and exotic language is relatively hard in these big and complex platforms. jEdit is a very able text editor, not and IDE, but it can be easily brushed up to support a some IDE-like things with relatively little effort.

Your programming can be done via jEdit macros, Beanshell scripts, Java, or any other more modern language on the JVM such as Scala.

Makarius
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