Have I really been using jEdit for 5 years now? Time flies, eh?
In that time I sort of dropped out of the jEdit community a bit, but I still use it daily. Yes, it still has bugs, and little things that annoy me, but overall I really like it. One problem I’ve had is that somewhere in the last year or so the XInsert plugin stopped working for me. It was last “officially” updated November 12, 2005. Urgh… Another abandoned piece of open source software. So even though I had written a ton of files for XInsert to use, I couldn’t use them. I ended up moving many of my files to use the Templates plugin, but still wasn’t happy. So since it’s open source, I started looking for a solution…
I found this post on the jEdit Community site with a reply titled “Fixed!” which said: “I’ve just removed comments at the beginning of dockables.xml file in xinsert.jar.” Really? Is that all it takes? Yes… I unjar’d the jar file, made the change, and rejar’d it, and the damn thing works. Imagine that. I wish I had found that fix a year ago.
Thus illustrates the good/bad of open source software. You scratch your own itch, but unless other know you even had an itch, they don’t know where to start scratching. Ummm, what I mean is, solving your own problems can take precedent to solving someone else’s problems, which is good for you, bad for the other person. Maybe we need to work on that? I dunno… I’m just glad my problem is solved.
To make things easier, you can download the version of the XInsert plugin I fixed.