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.

I've been using XEmacs as my primary text editor forever. However, it has some annoying features that have bugged me over the years:

1. Syntax coloring is somewhat limited - not enough unique "things" can be colorized.
2. Certain modes (e.g. python-mode) have a "shift block left/right" feature, but it is not available in all modes.
3. HTML mode is a pain. First, it asks for my email address every time I start a new page, so it can create an annoying template that I have to delete, and secondly the formatting really doesn't work very well.
4. When I edit C/C++ code on my Windows XP machine, and edit the same code later under Linux, the formatting is not the same. For some reason the indentation gets screwed up. (Possibly a version-creep thing between the two machines, but still, it shouldn't get screwed up.)

I've tried many editors over the years as a replacement (vim, cream, NEdit, jed), but none have matched XEmacs, so I've lived with its misfeatures. I had tried jEdit a few times before, but stumbled on two things:

1. I've found no way to assign a shortcut to run an external process like "make". This is an area where XEmacs really shines. After "make" runs, you get a clickable list of errors and can immediately jump to the problem spots. jEdit seems to have no equivalent functionality, though I'd love to hear that I'm wrong on this.
2. Although jEdit is cross-platform, fonts under Linux (xorg-x11) are really limited and ugly for some reason.

So I trudged on with XEmacs ...

The final straw for XEmacs came last week as I was editing some HTML and PHP code for the site, and XEmacs kept splitting the screen to give me a really bizarre error message that I could neither track down nor figure out how to turn off. Editing any HTML/PHP page seemed to do the same thing. Given the other warts, and since I'm getting into an HTML/PHP phase right now, I decided to make the plunge and try to switch to jEdit.