The action bar allows almost any editor feature to be accessed from the keyboard.

Utilities>Action Bar (shortcut: C+ENTER) displays the action bar at the bottom of the View and gives it keyboard focus. The action bar remembers previously entered strings; see Appendix C, History Text Fields for details.

To use the action bar, input a command and press Enter. The following commands are supported:

Action invocations

Each menu item and tool bar button is bound to an action. To find out the name of an action, invoke the menu item or click the tool bar button, and look in the action bar's history.

If a substring or an action name is entered, pressing Tab shows a popup listing matching actions. An action can be selected using the Up and Down arrow keys, or by entering more characters of its name.

Pressing Enter with an incomplete substring invokes the action that would be first in the completion popup's list.

For example, entering l-o will match global-options, which has the same effect as invoking Utilities>Global Options.

Buffer-local properties

Entering buffer.property=value sets the value of the buffer-local property named property to value. Buffer-local properties are documented in the section called “Buffer-Local Properties”.

For example, entering buffer.tabSize=4 changes the current buffer's tab size to 4.

See the section called “Buffer-Local Properties” for information about buffer-local properties.

Global properties

Entering property=value sets the value of the global property named property to value. This feature is primarily intended to help plugin developers, since the properties jEdit uses to store its settings are not currently documented.

Command repetition

To repeat a command multiple times, enter a number in the action bar, then press the key-combination that invokes the command. For example, “C+ENTER 1 4 C+d” will delete 14 lines; “C+ENTER 9 #” will insert “#########” in the buffer. Note: The space characters in these examples should not be typed; they are only here to visually separate the keys to be typed.

If you specify a repeat count greater than 20, a confirmation dialog box will be displayed, asking if you really want to perform the action. This prevents you from hanging jEdit by executing a command too many times.