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 General option pane lets you change various miscellaneous settings, such as the number of recent files to remember, if the buffer list should be sorted, and so on.
The Appearance option pane lets you change the Swing look and feel, as well as the fonts used to display user interface controls such as buttons, labels and menus.
The Text Area option pane lets you customize the appearance of the text area.
The Gutter option pane lets you customize the appearance of the gutter.
The Styles option pane lets you change the text styles and colors used for syntax highlighting.
The Loading and Saving option pane lets you change settings such as the autosave frequency, backup settings, file encoding, and so on.
The Editing option pane lets you change 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 Abbreviations option pane lets you enable or disable automatic abbreviation expansion, and 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 contain mode-specific 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 Shortcuts option pane let you change keyboard shortcuts. Each command can have up to two shortcuts associated with it.
The combo box at the top of the option pane selects the shortcut set to edit (command, plugin or macro shortcuts).
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 Docking option pane lets you specify which dockable windows should be floating, and which should be docked in the view.
The Context Menu option pane lets you edit the text area's right-click context menu.
The Tool Bar option pane lets you edit the tool bar, or disable it completely.
The Status Bar option pane lets you customize the status bar, or disable it completely.
The Printing option pane lets you customize 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 File System Browser group contains two option panes, General and Colors. The former lets you change various file system browser settings. The latter lets you customize glob patterns used for coloring the file list. See the section called "The File System Browser" for more information.