# jEdit 2.6 User's Guide

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# Chapter 3. Basic Features

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 working in 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 C. 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.

Figure 3-1. The jEdit splash screen

After jEdit has finished loading, the editor window will appear. Most user interface elements will be instantly familiar to users of graphical environments such as Windows, MacOS or GNOME. Some features are unique to jEdit, howerver. They will be described in the following paragraphs.

Clicking on the text area with the right mouse button will display a popup menu, offering fast access to various commands. Both the tool bar and context menu can be customized in the Utilities>Global Options dialog box. To aid in locating the caret, the current line is drawn with a slightly different background color. For the pedantic programmers among us, end of line markers at the end of each line are helpful for locating lines with trailing whitespace. Moving the caret closer than three lines from the top or bottom of the viewscreen will scroll the text area to make at least three lines above and below the caret visible. Having some "context" always visible helps when programming. This feature is called electric scrolling.

Many aspects of the text area's operation can be customized to your liking in the Text Area pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box.

The status bar at the bottom of the editor window displays useful information such as the current caret location, status messages issued by commands, and the state of the current buffer. The caret location is displayed in the following format:

    col column position line current line/total lines ratio%

Figure 3-2. The editor window

The far right of the status bar displays one of the following colored orbs depending on the state of the current buffer:

- White orb - displayed if there are no unsaved changes in the buffer

- Bright orange orb - displayed if the buffer contains unsaved changes

- Green orb - displayed if this is a newly created, empty, buffer, that doesn't exist on disk

- Yellow orb - displayed if this is a newly created buffer, with unsaved changes, that doesn't exist on disk

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