Personal blog of Seph Soliman Thoughts, Tinkerings and Tips

JEdit – Performance tips

jEdit starts a "jedit server" that loads your settings, environment and basicly loads everything but the GUI.

This process is what slows it down, but there are several things you can do to speed up the process:

1. Upgrade to Java 1.7 (beta). I find it rock stable, but you might not.
2. On Linux, you may enable OpenGL rendering by passing the following arguments: java -Dsun.java2d.opengl=True -jar jedit.jar
3. Keep the number of plugins low. Don't install too many auto-complete plugins such as DotComplete. It takes time to load the language-dictionaries in these plugins.
4. Last but not least: to have the jedit "server" running as a daemon in the background seriously decreases startup-time!
   
   However, it comes with a catch: Some plugins still require you to restart jedit in order to use them. 4.2 includes a new plugin-API that allows dynamic loading, so with time this isn't an issue. Also: certain setting-changes require you to restart jedit.
   
   Restarting jedit isn't just closing the window. You need to kill the jedit-server process, but it's just labeled "java"/"javaw" in most task-manager tools on both Linux and Windows. Just kill those you can find, but be warned that you may kill other java programs if you get the wrong process.
   

   
   
   Run this command to start the server-daemon:
   
   java -jar jedit.jar -nogui -background