Utilities>Global Options displays the global options dialog box. The dialog box is divided into several panes, each pane containing a set of related options. Use the list on the left of the dialog box to switch between panes. Only panes created by jEdit are described here; some plugins add their own option panes, and information about them can be found in the documentation for the plugins in question.
The Abbreviations option pane can be used to enable or disable automatic abbreviation expansion, and to edit currently defined abbreviations.
The combo box labeled “Abbrev set” selects the abbreviation set to edit. The first entry, “global”, contains abbreviations available in all edit modes. The subsequent entries correspond to each mode's local set of abbreviations.
To change an abbreviation or its expansion, either double-click the appropriate table entry, or click a table entry and then click the Edit button. This will display a dialog box for modifying the abbreviation.
The Add button displays a dialog box where you can define a new abbreviation. The Remove button removes the currently selected abbreviation from the list.
See the section called “Positional Parameters” for information about positional parameters in abbreviations.
The Appearance pane can be used to change the appearance of user interface controls such as buttons, labels and menus.
The Docking option pane specifies which dockable windows should be floating, and which should be docked in the view.
The Editing option pane contains settings such as the tab size, syntax highlighting and soft tabs on a global or mode-specific basis.
When changing mode-specific settings, the File name glob and First line glob text fields let you specify a glob pattern that names and first lines of buffers will be matched against to determine the edit mode. See Appendix D for information about glob patterns.
This option pane does not change XML mode definition files on disk; it merely writes values to the user properties file which override those set in mode files. To find out how to edit mode files directly, see Part II.
The General pane contains various miscellaneous settings, such as the number of recent files to remember, if the buffer list should be sorted, and so on.
The Loading and Saving option pane contains settings such as the autosave frequency, backup settings, file encoding, and so on.
The Printing option pane contains settings to control the appearance of printed output.
The Proxy Servers option pane lets you specify HTTP and SOCKS proxy servers to use when jEdit makes network connections (for example, when the plugin manager downloads plugins).
The Shortcuts option pane associates keyboard shortcuts with commands. Each command can have up to two shortcuts associated with it.
The combo box at the top of the option pane selects the command set to edit. Command sets include the set of all built-in commands, the commands of each plugin, and the set of macros.
To change a shortcut, click the appropriate table entry and press the keys you want associated with that command in the resulting dialog box. The dialog box will warn you if the shortcut is already assigned.
The Status Bar option pane contains settings to customize the status bar, or disable it completely.
The Syntax Highlighting pane can be used to customize the fonts and colors for syntax highlighting.
The Text Area pane contains settings to customize the appearance of the text area.
The File System Browser group contains two option panes, General and Colors. The former contains various file system browser settings. The latter configures glob patterns used for coloring the file list. See the section called “The File System Browser” for more information.