09 December 2015

how to fix jEdit 5.3.0 on OSX with Retina screen

jEdit is a great little editor: very flexible, much plugins, such macros, so java.
However, for some reason jEdit developers strenuously refuse to fix their OSX package to support Retina screens. Three years since these screens started getting popular, you still have to repeat the following procedure after each jEdit installation or update, in order to avoid getting blurry fonts everywhere:
  1. quit jEdit if open
  2. in Finder, right-click on jEdit in Applications, select Show Package Contents
  3. go to the Contents folder, then edit Info.plist by adding these two lines at the end of the file, just before </dict>:
    <key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
    <true/>
  4. force OSX to re-cache the plist by executing the following command in a terminal:
    defaults read /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist
  5. Restart jEdit. Icons will still look crappy (the "classic" theme slightly better than "tango"), but the rest will be ok.
On a more positive note, jEdit 5.3.0 (running on Java 1.8.0_66) seems to have fixed the crashes I've had for a year. Welcome back, "little editor that could".