Category Archives: jedit

Jedit still going strong – increase heap size

I still use jedit for all my tasks that require a text editor. I’ve been using it for about 4 years now and rarely find fault with it. One thing I did notice was that it slowed down quite alot if I was editing or searching large files. I knew this was down to Java and the JVM. I was not aware that you could increase the Java Heap Size which means you can increase the memory accessible by the JVM. The flag Xms is the initial heap size and Xmx is the Max heap size allowed (the default is 64m).

“C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_04\bin\javaw.exe” -Xms256m -Xmx768m -jar “C:\Program Files\jEdit\jedit.jar”

starts Jedit with an initial heap size of 256 MB and a max heap size of 768 MB which essentially means it can handle any size file I throw at it. (Source – http://javahowto.blogspot.com/2006/06/6-common-errors-in-setting-java-heap.html).

Another option (specific to Jedit) I found was the “reuseview” flag. This forces the file to be opened in an existing instance of Jedit rather than starting a new one.

“C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_04\bin\javaw.exe” -Xms256m -Xmx768m -jar “C:\Program Files\jEdit\jedit.jar” -reuseview “F:\Working\kf182\Databases\xml\data\Products\9826.xml”

Opens 9826.xml in an existing instance of Jedit.

Christmas Charity – the Open Source way

Every year for the last few years I have given to charity at Christmas. Last year it was Oxfam but this year I wanted to do something a bit different. In the early days of Aggreg8 development, I got a $10 donation and it freaked me out, I coded for days with a crazy energy and a boosted ego, knowing that someone thought that what I was doing was worth some of their hard earned cash. So this year, I have decided to give $5 to 10 different Open Source projects. The projects I have chosen are ones that I use on a day to day basis and really admire.

If we could all do something like this then Open source would continue to thrive and we will all reap the benefits for years and years to come. Joel noted that most people don’t want credit for donating but I do as donating is clearly not a selfless act ;).

Multiple instances of jEdit

I am a complete jEdit fanatic and it always has a place on my taskbar. jEdit is ver clever when running multiple versions each instance communicates over TCP IP so that all instances are identical. What if you don’t want that and want to have different file open in different instances of jEdit (or if you were using something like GoScreen). By default the shortcut for jEdit is something like:

“C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\bin\javaw.exe” -jar “C:\Program Files\jEdit\jedit.jar”

But to stop the instances communicating to each other you need to use a “-noserver” switch:

“C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\bin\javaw.exe” -jar “C:\Program Files\jEdit\jedit.jar” -noserver

I found the above in the wonderful jEdit userguide, chapter “starting jEdit“.