Thursday, November 18, 2004

Jedit rules

Okay, I've had it again with Eclipse. It's slow, cumbersome, and drives me nuts with its unresponsive behavior. Several times this week I've completely lost my keyboard functionality. Sure it responds to the mouse and I can navigate, click on menus, etc. But i can't type! Usually I have to either reset the beast or I have to open a model
dialog, then close it, and then the keyboard may work. Either way, I'm jumping back to JEdit.

Several huge plug-ins I got working this morning and absolutely love:

a) Open It. This functions just like the Open Resource in Eclipse: a dialog pops-up, you type in the filename and it matches as you type. This is great because it alleviates the necessity to use the built-in file-explorer in JEdit (which I think is kind of a pain).

b) Dot-Complete. Finally had some inspiration this morning in getting this to work the way I want it. Our projects are Maven projects. How to get the classpath into Dot Complete? Solution is simple, maven -X build-ourproject. Dumps out the the classpath that's created from the dependencies in project.xml. This is great! Now it works and is saving me time and pain of constantly referencing Javadocs.

c) XML/HTML. While I have had this working forever, I simply love how easy it is to create XML/HTML docs in JEdit. It's awesome because it auto-completes closing tabs, shows the hierarchy of the DOM (in relation to the current element) and is overall so fluid. Have yet to find something so simple and powerful. Oxygen is too bloated, Eclipse HTML editor is crap, etc. JEdit reigns in this area.

d) JDiff. This is a beautifully simplistic diff. Nothing else to add. It just works, and functions nicely.

e) Java Browser. If you like the ctrl+o functionality in Eclipse, then this does an adequate job of replicating the behavior. Opinions may differ.

f) Getters/Setters. Autogenerate these by selecting the the variables for which you want them created. Then run the build-in macro.

g) Class Wizard. Rather simple but competent class wizard (for those that like using wizards).

Only thing missing now is a nice syntax validator for the missing ;

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