Jade is an Emacs-like text editor for Unix/X11, although ports to other systems will be straightforward. Jade implements most of the basic Emacs functionality, but is not intended as a straight clone. All editor commands are implemented in Lisp, giving scope for comprehensive customisation and extension.

Jade is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

The most recent public release of Jade is version 3.2, dating from October 1994; this version is still available on various ftp sites, for example: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/editors/X/jade-3.2.tar.gz.

The manual for this version is available online here.

There is also a much more recent version of Jade available, but only as a snapshot of the CVS tree. It is unlikely that a formal release will follow anytime soon. New features that have already been implemented include:

• Supports GTK+ as well as Xlib ``window systems''
• Vastly improved redisplay algorithms
• A mail reader with complex folder filtering and combining, and MIME support
• A text-mode web browser
• RCS and CVS interfaces
• Transparent access to remote files
• An Emacs-like Dired mode
• Ispell interface (interactive or background)
• Support for TAGS files
• Interactive telnet and rlogin sessions in buffers
• Regions of buffers may now have specific properties, i.e. font attributes, local variables, major mode, etc...
• Blocks/selections can now be marked by dragging with the mouse
• Buffer-restrictions: the ability to limit the viewable region of each buffer
• Sub-windows: each physical window can be split into several panes
• The minibuffer is now a normal buffer
• Proper filling of text regions
• A mode for editing TeX and LaTeX source
• Commands for printing regions of buffers
• Execution of synchronous shell commands, e.g. for filtering editor regions
• Better handling of X11 selections
• Supports multiple X11 displays
• Faster reading of files into buffers
• Fixes for a lot of minor bugs and misfeatures

Although this is still alpha software, I use it all the time, with very few problems. Also note that the manual has not been touched for a very long time, almost four years in fact. To compile this you'll also need to install librep, the LISP interpreter used by Jade. For the optional GTK+ support, the rep-gtk binding is also required.

Alternatively you may use anonymous CVS to access the latest development sources (with no guarantees that they will work correctly, or even compile).

    cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.librep.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/librep login
    cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.librep.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/librep co jade

When prompted for a password for anonymous, simply press the Enter key. Updates from within the module's directory do not need the -d parameter.

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