As I've mentioned before, I've switched to jEdit from XEmacs. I use both WinXP and Linux, and one thing that was nice about using XEmacs was that it was easy to sync my settings between machines. All I had to do was worry about two files: init.el and custom.el. Both were portable, and could be copied directly between machines.

With jEdit, though, there is an entire tree of settings. These settings live under either ~/.jedit/ on POSIX machines, or under "Documents and Settings/USERNAME/.jedit" on a Windows machine. On my Linux machine, for example, there are 104 files under ~/.jedit. It certainly appears that it will be a huge task to sync between machines. There is a "HOWTO" page, but all it really tells you is how hard it is to do. Its more discouraging than helpful, I think.

Once I dug around, though, I found I could sync two machines with a fairly simple process. There are three things that I want to sync between machines:

1. Colors (syntax highlighting)
2. Keyboard shortcuts
3. Macros

Keyboard shortcuts and colors are both found in the file 'properties'. I sync it by first copying the 'properties' file from the Windows box to the Linux box, then doing the following on the Linux box:

(Assuming the two files are called ~/.jedit/properties, and ~/XFER/properties):

 $ grep shortcut ~/.jedit/properties | sort > P1 

$ grep shortcut ~/XFER/properties | sort > P2 

$ diff -u -b -B P1 P2 | more  

This pulls out all the keyboard shortcuts, in sorted order, and compares them. From here it is easy to see what needs updating. (I'm a little scared to just copy the properties file directly from one machine to another, because it looks like some OS-dependent settings are in there. The "HOWTO" page seems to discourage this as well.)

Secondly, I repeat the process for colors:

$ grep color ~/.jedit/properties | sort > P1 

$ grep color ~/XFER/properties | sort > P2 

$ diff -u -b -B P1 P2 | more 

Of course, you can also just compare the files directly like:

 $ sort ~/.jedit/properties > P1 

$ sort ~/XFER/properties > P2 

$ diff -u -b -B P1 P2 | more 

But I like to do colors & shortcuts separately, since it cuts down the size of the diff I have to read through each time. I like to do a final diff on the complete files, but I haven't found anything (so far) other than colors and keyboard settings that I want to sync.

The third thing to sync are macros. I just compare & copy ~/.jedit/macros/* to the macros/ directory on the Windows machine. I've thought about putting the macros directory under version control with darcs, but I don't write macros that often, so manual syncing is OK. jEdit rescans the macros directory each time you start it, so there are no other settings to adjust.

I've found I can just ignore all the other files under ~/.jedit. In theory, plugins can write their own settings to files other than 'properties', but so far I haven't used any that do that.

This process is still a little too much to want to do on, e.g. a daily basis, but since my settings don't change that much, I just resync either when I know I've changed something, or do just a monthly (or so) sanity check.