There is always a need for quality software to get job done. Many software projects have their own advantages and disadvantages. JEdit is a superior text editor that let programmer develop, let kid play, and is highly attractive for a web designer.
As a matter of fact, I could NOT find a language that used in today web development that is not supported in jEdit's syntax highlighting.
JEdit is written entirely in Java, it runs well on ALL the architectures I tested it on: Windows XP, Linux, and Apple OS X.
Despites long-going gossip about Java application running too slow, jEdit runs fast and it is very responsive environment. The metaphor to gravity would be the way how the pull-down menus behave themselves in Java versus Microsoft Windows. People who use to use software applications written with MFC and ATL for Microsoft Windows will find the fact that in Java default behavior a pull-down menu would not disappear until user clicks it with mouse button!
JEdit has very intuitive interface, and many plugins that make it possible to work with HTML, Java, C++, and even the Factor which is another project by jEdit's creator Slava Pestov. JEdit provides tag auto completion for people who use to that and like it; HTML is one of the language whose tags are fully supported. It is a great deal to check for matching brackets in all the C-style programming languages, and jEdit does it perfectly. Moreover, user doesn't need to close the jEdit and rename the file with changing the extension to .html, just in four clicked user can get highlighting for any language he or she wishes to program in. It is easy to design your own scripts for highlighting in jEdit as well.
Consequently, jEdit, being freely available turns out to be the most flexible text editor on the planet at this time. JEdit is the certainly very positive software, and there is no such a weakness that I can think about that jEdit contain but other editors don't have.
The downside of this program is that there is no WYSIWYG mode available! It means that either users of jEdit with do hands-on coding, which is the rationale for this program, or use other tools!
There are still people who think that if application is written in intermediate language it is very slow and uncomfortable to use. It is certainly not the case with jEdit. If there is an observation to be made then it turns out to be that text editor such as jEdit "spends" a way more time waiting for user actions then taking actual processor's time to do computations. Even if a hypothetical creature would be able to type an HTML code with processor's speed, let's say 3.6 billion cycles per second, there are no such peripheral devices to process that kind of intense input / output anyway: no mouse, no keyboard, there are no controllers for them running at 3.6 billion cycles per second!
As a result of all the facts stayed above it is very safe to say that text editor written in intermediate language and running in virtual machine, such as jEdit, is an essential part of today's life, and it is NOT in vein anymore!
Reading my review, you can get an idea that I am affiliated with the jEdit developers' team. However, it MAY turn to be a false assumption.