Jedit is amazing. It's like the Firefox of text editors - not the smallest or fastest, not the biggest or slowest, but reasonably quick and very very extensible. I would say that other tools (vi and especially emacs) are also very extensible, but Jedit has no learning curve and fits in well with Windows.

That said, I'm slowly becoming more efficient in vi and it will eventually overtake Jedit for myself.

I used jEdit for a long time. It's an excellent editor, but I left it behind for Vim. I had to spend a lot of time on remote machines and I needed something with a console mode.

It's my impression that it was orphaned. Is it still under active development? I'd like it to keep going.

I use Eclipse for java and xml, falling back to jEdit (which I used exclusively for several years) for pretty much every other file type.

jEdit is great for its impressive range of language syntax highlighting support, large selection of small and useful plugins, good search/replace features, and ease of writing your own syntax highlight modes, recording macros, etc. As others have said, it has the power of emacs or vim, and everything is customizable, but it lacks any substantial barrier to entry.

It also has the advantage that you can use the same user profile on multiple platforms (e.g. linux/windows) - before I ditched my Windows machine I ran like that, rsync'ing everything to/from linux at work.

It's certainly still being developed, though activity is less than in the past. Last release was July: http://jedit.org/index.php?page=devel#schedule

I've found that the latest 4.3 releases are very stable and largely feature-complete for the purposes I use it for.

I've been using jEdit for years now for all non .NET dev which I use Visual Studio due to code insight mainly (who can remember all the library stuff!).

jEdit is great, it works on both Windows and Linux with no visual quirks, you easily make up your own syntax for custom languages, it has a console, a file system and a project viewer plugin.

Also it has subpixel sampling for fonts which keeps my eyes not falling off the sockets after long time hacking. Finally a feature that I have not found in other editors in the custom folding modes (like the region thing in VS) which makes it easy to understand the structure of long files.

The only negative issue that I 've noticed so far is the missing character substitution for foreign languages due to the Java thing. For example if you use a monospace font other than courier new and your code/resources contains multiple languages, english, greek, japanese etc you get squary blocks all over the place. All native Windows and Linux apps do automatic font substitution!