Personal blog of Seph Soliman Thoughts, Tinkerings and Tips

jEdit gets a new icon set

jEdit, a popular cross-platform java-based editor, has for long been using an icon theme without any appeal to common sense or visual liking. About a year ago I slowly started working on a patch that could help us change this and give jEdit the visual feel or a professional and well-working tool that newcomers can trust to work as expected.

During the time I've been using and spreading the use of jEdit I've noticed that people tend to initially distrust jEdit since it doesn't offer an interface they can relate to.
jEdit offers many features and has a hard time offering them to the user in a familiar way and even more difficult to make them visually appealing.

Anyhow - a year ago or so I came across the Tango Desktop Project and started integrating it into jEdit. The patch was recently merged into jEdit's trunk version and will be available in the next development release, jEdit 4.3pre14.
People have responded positively and those who became more familar with the classic icons has also given the possibility choose the "classic" icon set in the "Appearance" options-section:

Alan Ezust invited me to become a developer on jEdit with focus on any bugs related to the icon patch and perhaps other issues as well. After accepting I am now looking for small ways to improve the general feel of the editor.

If possible I will also look into getting better Mac OS X support since I use an iMac at work.