# jEdit 2.6 User's Guide

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## Chapter 9. Customizing jEdit

# The Global Options Dialog Box

Utilities>Global Options displays the global options dialog box. A whole slew of settings can be customized here. The dialog box is divided into several panes, each pane containing a set of related options. To switch between panes, use the list on the left of the dialog box. Only panes created by jEdit are described here; some plugins add their own option panes, and information about them can be found in the plugin documentation.

## The General Pane

The General option pane allows you to change various miscellaneous settings, such as the number of recent files to remember, file encoding, default file separator, and Swing look & feel.

## The Editor Pane

The Editor option pane allows you to change settings such as the tab size, syntax highlighting and soft tabs, on both a global and edit mode-specific basis.

When editing mode-specific settings, the "file name glob" and "first line glob" fields allow you to specify a glob pattern that names and first lines of buffers will be matched against.

Due to a quirk in jEdit's properties implementation, changes to some settings in this option pane only take effect in newly opened files.

This option pane does not change XML mode definition files on disk; it merely writes values to the user properties file which override those in mode files. To find out how to edit mode files directly, see Chapter 5.

## The Text Area Pane

The Text Area option pane allows you to customize the appearance of the text area and gutter.

## The Colors & Styles Pane

The Colors & Styles pane allows you to change various colors used by the text area, and the text styles used by syntax highlighting. Clicking on a color or style will display the appropriate editor for changing it.

## The Docking Pane

The Docking pane allows you to specify if dockable windows should be displayed in their own frame, or docked in the current view. The only dockable window currently in the jEdit core is the VFS browser (see the section called The VFS Browser in Chapter 8). Plugins can add their own.

## The Context Menu Pane

The Context Menu pane allows you to edit the text area's right-click context menu.

## The Tool Bar Pane

The Tool Bar pane allows you to customize the tool bar, or disable it completely.

## The Shortcut Editing Panes

The Command Shortcuts pane allows you to change key bindings for jEdit's commands. The Macro Shortcuts pane allows you to change macro key bindings.

Internally, jEdit stores key bindings in the form `modifiers`+`key` where `modifiers` is a list of modifiers, with C being Control, A being Alt, and S being Shift. `key` is either an alphanumeric character, or a named key stroke such as PAGE_UP. A full list of named key strokes is available in the API documentation for the `java.awt.event.KeyEvent` class.

jEdit also allows multiple keystroke bindings; for example, Open Path is bound to C+e C+o. Any number of keystrokes can be present in a key binding.

## The Abbreviations Pane

The Abbreviations pane allows you to enable or disable automatic abbreviation expansion, and edit the currently defined abbrevs.

The combo box labelled "Abbrev set" is used to choose the abbrev set to edit. The first entry, "global", allows you to edit abbrevs available in all edit modes. The subsequent entries allow you to edit abbrevs on a per-mode basis.

Abbrevs are added and removed in a rather peculiar fashion in this pane. Changing the last line in the list (which is always blank) will add another blank line. Lines with empty abbrevs or expansions will be ignored when the abbrevs are being saved.

Within an abbrev expansion, you can enter "\n" to mean a newline and "\t" for a tab character. If "\|" appears in the expansion, the caret will be moved to that location after the abbrev is expanded, and the "\|" will not appear in the buffer. For example, if you define "il" to expand to "SwingUtilities.invokeLater(\|);", expanding "il" will insert "SwingUtilities.invokeLater();" in the buffer, with the caret positioned between the brackets.

## The Printing Pane

The Printing pane allows you to customize what printed output looks like by changing the font, margins, and several flags.

## The VFS Browser Pane

The VFS Browser pane allows you to customize the file system browser used by the File>Open File, File>Save As and Utilities>File System Browser commands.

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