jEdit Portable 4.2.0 Dev Test 3

Thanks for catching that. I thought I had gone through that step, but evidently missed it on this one. Shouldn't affect operation.

I'll take a look at the splash screen functionality. I hope to have a new version up within a day or two.

John wants the Portable splash to fade into the app's own splash. You can take it up with him whether that default behavior is annoying.

Hi Rob,

On Linux, the .jedit directory is normally found in the home directory (e.g. /home/scrape/.jedit). On Windows, the .jedit directory is normally found in Documents and Settings, e.g. "C:\Documents and Settings\Scrape\.jedit" (or maybe in AppDir, it doesn't matter).

jEdit Portable uses a windows launcher to start the program in such a way that it uses a Java runtime found on the USB drive (in the place set up for OpenOffice.org), and redirects the .jedit directory to the place you mention, in the .\Data directory on the USB drive. One particular consideration is that the launcher won't work as a native application under Linux. (It might under Wine, but I'm not sure why you would want to.)

The main trick the launcher uses is to call java(w) with a -D command line option, specifically -Duser.home="$SETTINGSDIRECTORY" as well as -jar "$PROGRAMDIRECTORY\${DEFAULTJAR}". If you can set up a shell script to launch whatever java runtime is available on the linux box, with the -D command line option pointing user.home to the USB drive instead of ~/, and -jar pointing to the jedit.jar file on the USB drive at ./PortableApps/jEditPortable/App/Jedit/jedit.jar, that should do it.

The main trick would be that the USB drive might not be mounted at the same point on different linux machines, so an absolute path might not work. So you'd need a shell script that was able to parse out the correct directory/path and substitute it in the right place, or use relative paths that worked consistently. There's the other tricks too, such as getting around the FAT32 filesystem on the USB drive, which might not mark things as executable.

Next time I have some quality time with a Linux box I'll experiment and see if I can come up with something.

Bottom line: if one makes a shell script to parse out the paths, launch java and tell it to look for the .jedit directory in the right place on the USB drive, that would be be most of what you are talking about. The jar files are cross platform (as far as I know), and the data stored in the .jedit directory is cross platform as well.