Chapter 3. Basic Features

Table of Contents
Starting jEdit
The Activity Log
Opening Files
Creating New Files
The Caret
Selecting Text
Entering and Deleting Text
Undo and Redo
The Clipboard
Saving Files
Printing and Sending Files
Closing Files and Exiting jEdit

This chapter describes jEdit's basic features, such as opening, saving, printing and simple editing. jEdit works in a similar fashion to most MacOS or Windows text editors; if you have used one before, you will be able to start using jEdit immediately.

Starting jEdit

Exactly how jEdit is started depends on your operating system; most often you would type "jedit" at the command line or double click on the jEdit icon (or select it from a menu, or whatever). jEdit will open any files specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon. It is also possible to specify a line or marker to locate the caret on from the command line; see Appendix A. If no initial file names are given, jEdit will load any files that were open in the previous session.

Once started, jEdit will display a "splash screen" with the jEdit logo and a progress bar that advances while jEdit loads. After a short delay, the editor window will appear. Most of the user interface elements will look familiar to Windows or MacOS users, except for the text area, which has some unique features.

Figure 3-1. The jEdit splash screen

The text area displays the contents of the currently opened buffer. The two scroll bars can be used to move around the buffer when there is more text than can fit on the screen. The blinking red line is called the caret. All text insertion and deletion is performed at the caret position.

Notice how the line with the caret is highlighted, and a faint blue dot appears at the end of each line. The current line highlighting aids in locating the caret, and the dot is an end of line marker.

The lines painted with red tildes ("~") are invalid lines - they are visible for one reason or another, but don't actually exist in the document.

The text area never allows the caret to be positioned on the first or last visible line. If It is moved closer than 3 lines to the top or bottom, the viewscreen will shift in the appropriate direction to make 3 lines above and below the caret visible. Having some "context" always visible helps when programming, for example. This feature is called electric scrolling.

Clicking the text area with the right mouse button will display a menu of frequently-used editing commands. This menu can be edited in the Utilities>Global Options dialog box; see the section called The Global Options Dialog Box in Chapter 8.

The status area at the bottom left of the editor window displays information about the caret position. Here is an example:

col 42 line 70/100 70%

The first number is the column position, or how far the caret is from the start of the line. The second pair of numbers is the current line, and the total number of lines in the buffer. The third number is the ratio of the current line to the total number of lines.

Figure 3-2. The editor window