I have been a fan of EditPlus for some years now, and I have (*shamefully*) tried some other editors from time to time, including jEdit, but I never really found anything even close to the ease of use and speed of EditPlus. That is, until now.
jEdit, the free software written in Java, is in its latest incarnation a fast and highly costumizable all-round editor with a very good learning curve.
jEdit Programmers Text Editor
The best part about jEdit is the ability to use your own syntax definition files, which are simply XML files. I am currently using this for work, but I would probably would have used it instead of EditPlus when I was working with the Nemesys assembly (see nemesys assembly language syntax file for EditPlus in the downloads area). The only good thing about EditPlus was the very very fast boot up speed. It was only a tiny bit slower than notepad!
Another great highlight is the ability to perform search and replace using normal (aka GNU’s) regular expressions. Now, this is a *serious* tool! You can even use that to check for your regex syntax matches in the file you have open. This has saved me countless hours of frustrating copy-paste-delete repetitions on huge files.
A lot can also be added with many plugins, my favourite being the FTP (which allows you to deal with ftp sites as if they were local drives), the tabbed editing (easy access to multiple open files) and the extended regex, which gives empowers your regex ability.
Check it out for yourself!
