# jEdit 5.3 User's Guide

Legal Notice

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, each as defined in the license. A copy of the license can be found in the file `COPYING.DOC.txt` included with jEdit.

The jEdit all-volunteer developer team
1.0 - 4.3
1999-2004
Slava Pestov
Initial HTML document
3.2 - 4.1
2001-2002
John Gellene
Initial DocBook version. Initial versions of Plugin Guide and Macro Guide.
4.3 - 5.3
2005-2015
Alan Ezust
Maintainer.

## Using jEdit

This part of the user's guide covers jEdit's text editing commands, along with basic usage of macros and plugins.

This part of the user's guide was originally written by Slava Pestov and is maintained by the jEdit core development team.

## Writing Edit Modes

This part of the user's guide covers writing edit modes for jEdit.

Edit modes specify syntax highlighting rules, auto indent behavior, and various other customizations for editing different file types. For general information about edit modes, see .

This part of the user's guide was written by Slava Pestov and is maintained by the jEdit core development team.

## Writing Macros

This part of the user's guide covers writing macros for jEdit.

First, we will tell you a little about BeanShell, jEdit's macro scripting language. Next, we will walk through a few simple macros. We then present and analyze a dialog-based macro to illustrate additional macro writing techniques. Finally, we discuss several tips and techniques for writing and debugging macros.

## Writing Plugins

This part of the user's guide covers writing plugins for jEdit.

Like jEdit itself, plugins are written primarily in Java. While this guide assumes some working knowledge of the language, you are not required to be a Java wizard. If you can write a useful application of any size in Java, you can write a plugin.

Where applicable, this section will also explain how jEdit's source code is similar. Therefore, this is also a good introduction to to jEdit development.