> displays the global options dialog box. The dialog box is divided into several panes, each pane containing a set of related options. Use the list on the left of the dialog box to switch between panes. Only panes created by jEdit are described here; some plugins add their own option panes, and information about them can be found in the documentation for the plugins in question.
The pane contains various settings, such as the default line separator, the number of recent files to remember, if the buffer list should be sorted, and so on.
The option pane can be used to enable or disable automatic abbreviation expansion, and to edit currently defined abbreviations.
The combo box labelled “Abbrev set” selects the abbreviation set to edit. The first entry, “global”, contains abbreviations available in all edit modes. The subsequent entries correspond to each mode's local set of abbreviations.
To change an abbreviation or its expansion, either double-click the appropriate table entry, or click a table entry and then click the button. This will display a dialog box for modifying the abbreviation.
The button displays a dialog box where you can define a new abbreviation. The button removes the currently selected abbreviation from the list.
See the section called “Positional Parameters” for information about positional parameters in abbreviations.
The pane can be used to change the appearance of user interface controls such as buttons, labels and menus. The number of items retained in history text fields can also be set here; see Appendix C, History Text Fields.
Note that changes to certain settings such as the Swing look and feel require a restart of jEdit to take effect.
The option pane contains settings for the autosave and backup features. See the section called “Autosave and Crash Recovery” and the section called “Backups”.
The option pane edits the text area's right-click context menu. See the section called “Multiple Views”.
The option pane specifies docking location for various dockable windows. Another way to specify docking locations is to use the popup menus associated with each dockable window; see the section called “Window Docking”.
The option pane contains settings such as the tab size, syntax highlighting and soft tabs on a global or mode-specific basis.
Changing options from this optionpane does not change XML mode definition files on disk; it merely writes values to the user properties file which override those set in mode files. To find out how to edit mode files directly, see Part II, “Writing Edit Modes”. Some of these options can be further overridden on an individual file basis through the use of buffer-local properties.
The File name
glob and First line glob text
fields let you specify a glob pattern that names and first lines of
buffers will be matched against to determine the edit mode. See
Appendix D, Glob Patterns for information about glob patterns.
The Extra Word Characters allows you to set the noLineSep buffer property on a mode-wide basis, allowing you to define what is considered part of a word when double-clicking on it in the text area.
The Deep Indent option instructs jEdit to indent subsequent lines so that they line up with the open bracket on the previous line.
This option pane is new to jEdit 4.3, and offers international users of jEdit many flexible options for defining how Encodings are handled in jEdit. See the section called “Character Encodings” for the basics.
In previous versions of jEdit, there was very little encoding autodetection, so use autodetection when possible is an option you can switch on or off.
The List of Encoding Autodetector Names is
an experimental feature that allows for jEdit and plugins to offer
additional encoding autodetector routines. At the moment, there are
two techniques known by jEdit: the BOM (Byte
Order Mark), and the XML-PI (XML processing
instruction) techniques. Others can be defined as services and added
to this space-separated list. See EncodingDetector
for details on how to offer this service. The order they appear in this
list determines the order of detectors that are tried on each file.
The List of Fallback Encodings is used when
a file fails to open in the default encoding, and the Encoding
Autodetectors also fail. The list order here determines the order of
encodings that are tried. Each is separated by a space. This is
especially handy when doing directory searches through files of
different encodings. We suggest using UTF-8 as
either your default or one of the fallback encodings.
While jEdit allows you to edit files in a variety of different encodings, the average user switches between only 2 or 3. In other parts of jEdit, where the list of encodings is displayed in a combobox (such as the buffer options) or a menu (such as submenu) it may be desirable to display only a subset of available encodings, those that are in common local use. The Encodings checkbox list allows the user to select the subset of supported encodings to display in other GUI components that list all of the encodings.
The option pane contains settings to customize the appearance of the gutter. See the section called “Interface Overview”.
The option pane contains settings for toggling drag and drop of text, as well as gutter mouse click behavior.
The only option that may not be self-explanatory is the Double-Click drag joins non-alphanumeric characters. This option means that double-click will select a region that includes the non-alphabetical characters, as defined for the current mode. The actual set of characters can be defined for an indiviual file via buffer-local properties (noWordSep) or on a mode-wide basis from the Editing option pane (Extra Word Characters).
The option pane contains settings to control the appearance of printed output. Workarounds that might be needed for your Java version to print correctly can also be enabled here. See the section called “Printing”.
The pane contains a chooser for the desired download mirror, as well as various settings such as the directory where plugins are to be installed. In addition, you can set the time in minutes that the pluginlist can be cached from jedit.org, helping to reduce the server load. See Chapter 9, Installing and Using Plugins.
The option pane lets you specify HTTP and SOCKS proxy servers to use when jEdit makes network connections, for example when downloading plugins.
The option pane associates keyboard shortcuts with commands. Each command can have up to two shortcuts associated with it.
The combo box at the top of the option pane selects the command set to edit. Command sets include the set of all built-in commands, the commands of each plugin, and the set of macros.
To change a shortcut, click the appropriate table entry and press the keys you want associated with that command in the resulting dialog box. The dialog box will warn you if the shortcut is already assigned.
Some shortcuts, such as C+e, C+m, and C+r, are prefixes for two-keystroke shortcuts. Another keystroke may be used as a prefix in a 2-key shortcut, so for example, C+x can be redefined as a prefix to make it more emacs-like, by mapping any other action to a C+x prefixed shortcut.
Conversely, emacs users will notice at first that C+e can not be mapped as a single key shortcut to go to the end of the line, unless all of the other actions that contain C+e prefixed shortcuts are remapped to other shortcuts first. After that, C+e can be bound to end-of-line.
The default shortcuts can be found in jedit_keys.props.
The option pane contains settings to customize the status bar, or disable it completely. See the section called “The Status Bar”.
The pane can be used to customize the fonts and colors for syntax highlighting. See the section called “Syntax Highlighting”.
The pane contains settings to customize the appearance of the text area. See the section called “Interface Overview”.
The option pane lets you edit the tool bar, or disable it completely. See the section called “Multiple Views”.
The option pane lets you change various settings related to the editor window's appearance, including the arrangement of dockable windows, and if the search bar and buffer switcher should be visible. See the section called “Multiple Views”.
The group contains two option panes, and . The former contains various file system browser settings. The latter configures glob patterns used for coloring the file list. See the section called “The File System Browser (FSB)” for more information.