Thursday, December 01, 2005

Get your filthy hands of my context menu

I seem to never get along with jEdit. For some unknown reason, I've installed and uninstalled it time and time again. Everytime I read something interesting about it, and do the downloading, only to give up on it about 2 days later, let it hand around my harddrive, then uninstall it.
I do my text-editoring in Vim, and use language specific IDEs for specific languages (like Eclipse for Java), so it's not that necessary. But (and there's always a but), I am looking for a lighter-weight application to do Java coding on my laptop, since the poor thing can't even dream of handling Eclipse with its 64 MB of RAM. So I keep turning to jEdit for some relief, only to get flabbergasted for the nth time.
This time was no better. I've downloaded, only to be smacked in my face when it added a "open with jEdit" option to my context menu (aka "Right-Click menu" on Windows). A quick trip to the Regedit removed that pest, but the sour taste still lingers. I just hate it when applications decide for me what they will install and where. The next thing was the plugins download. The concept here is simple. The preliminary download gives you a full featured text editor, nothing less, but, nothing more. However, there are many user-made plugins (as expected from an open source project) which extends the software up to a full-blown IDE ability, with all the bells and whistles. It's a bit confusing, to be honest, as you sometimes have three or four plugins that do the same thing, with minor changes, but it's still a very good concept, and hopefully, one that demands less resources than Eclipse.
The plugin download process is also very painless. You open up the plugin menu, select a mirror, check every plugin you wish (the software will check any dependencies automatically) and click on "Install". After about 3 minutes, jEdit starts to hammer you with "connection refused" error messages with a machine-gun speed. Once you clear them all up, the plugin download interface reset itself (losing all the marks you made) and that's about it. Currently I'm looking through the site, trying to see whether there's some sort of package download, as I'm not going to start hand picking them, we're talking about 30 something plugins. I'm giving jEdit a really long rope, since I'm quite sure that failing, this will be the last change it gets from me in a long while.

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