# jEdit 4.5 User's Guide

1999 2004 Slava Pestov
2001 2002 John Gellene
2005 2011 Alan Ezust

Legal Notice

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, each as defined in the license. A copy of the license can be found in the file `COPYING.DOC.txt` included with jEdit.

## Using jEdit

This part of the user's guide covers jEdit's text editing commands, along with basic usage of macros and plugins.

This part of the user's guide was originally written by Slava Pestov and is maintained by the jEdit core development team.

## Writing Edit Modes

This part of the user's guide covers writing edit modes for jEdit.

Edit modes specify syntax highlighting rules, auto indent behavior, and various other customizations for editing different file types. For general information about edit modes, see .

This part of the user's guide was written by Slava Pestov and is maintained by the jEdit core development team.

## Writing Macros

This part of the user's guide covers writing macros for jEdit.

First, we will tell you a little about BeanShell, jEdit's macro scripting language. Next, we will walk through a few simple macros. We then present and analyze a dialog-based macro to illustrate additional macro writing techniques. Finally, we discuss several tips and techniques for writing and debugging macros.

This part of the user's guide was written by John Gellene jgellene@nyc.rr.com.

## Writing Plugins

This part of the user's guide covers writing plugins for jEdit.

Like jEdit itself, plugins are written primarily in Java. While this guide assumes some working knowledge of the language, you are not required to be a Java wizard. If you can write a useful application of any size in Java, you can write a plugin.

This part of the user's guide was originally written by John Gellene. As of jEdit 4.3, it is maintained by Alan Ezust with help from others in the jEdit core development team.