Macification – Day 3

Day 3 proved much easier and quite successful in my quest for Macification. The standard install of PHP in OS X lacks a few of the libraries that I regularly use so rather that figure out how to activate them I did the next best thing; Download an update! Entropy have an excellent ‘one-click update’ for PHP on OS X and it was a painless excercise. Including the download, it took 3 minutes to update to the latest version and activate all of the libraries I need. McDonalds latest advertising cliche ringing in my mind.. ‘Mmm… Lovin’ it!!’

My quest for a code editor was a bit more challenging in that I had found a number of candidates that looked promising. I wanted all of the usual things that people would want in an editor; Syntax highlighting being the most obvious and important. Other features I hoped to find were FTP access to my sites, tabs for each window and support for various filetypes. From the few I tried, the one that immediately had me saying ‘Wow, how much does this cost?’ was jEdit, an open source project!

jEdit supports over 130 filetypes as standard but new ones can be added easily if you need more! Initially it lacked a couple of features I would have liked but I soon discovered the plugin manager where there are hundreds of available upgrades. I installed a tabs plugin, an ftp access plugin, an autocomplete plugin a code beautifier plugin, a plugin that will make a webpage of code from any given selection… all my requirements and more!! At some stage I plan to experiment with the subversion integration it offers. Being a Java application I was initially very skeptical. My past experience tells me that they load and run as fast a fat man in treacle. In this case I was pleasantly surprised. Whether its the Mac platform or just the 7 years of development on jEdit, it ran just like any other application. I would like to test it on my PC (Have to love Java for that!) but I am not allowed to turn it on yet! If it runs ok on there, I will be very happy as that will give some consistency accross my platforms. If you want to see for yourself what jEdit can do, check the Features page on the website. You should probably check the active community site aswell.

The only niggling issue I have at this stage is the highlighting colours… just not what I am used to. Luckily, all I need to do is change the XML file and I can have any colours I want.