RText

RText is a programmer's text editor written in Java. It has all the features you would expect:

• Syntax highlighting for 50+ languages
• Code folding
• Regex search and replace
• Find/replace in files
• Varying degrees of code completion for C, Java, Perl, JavaScript, and more
• Varying degrees of syntax checking for various languages (JSHint integration for JavaScript, compiler checking for Perl, XML well-formedness checking, etc.)
• Programmatic macros, write them in either JavaScript or Groovy
• Application lifecycle (bootstrap, plugin loading, cleanup, shutdown)
• Preference loading and saving
• User-configurable key bindings
• Standard modals for Options, Help, About, Printing
• File chooser (richer feature set and improved usability over JFileChooser)
• Dockable windows
• External tools
• Much more

Building

RText uses Gradle to build. To compile, run all unit tests, create the jar, and run the app:

./gradlew build installDist
java -jar build/install/rtext/RText.jar

Note that RText requires Java 25 or later to build.

Building the Windows application and installer

To create the Windows version of the application, run the generateWindowsStarterExe task in addition to installDist. This ensures a trimmed-down JRE is generated, and a starter RText.exe file is added into build/install/rtext:

./gradlew clean build installDist generateWindowsStarterExe

The generateWindowsStarterExe task uses a JDK 21 install and launch4j as defined in gradle.properties.

Note this gradle task runs jlink directly and uses launch4j rather than using jpackage since our app needs loose files and jpackage seems to require all files being wrapped into the generated .exe. This is different than our macOS app task (discussed below) which uses jpackage.

After building the installable image, you can create the win32 installer by running the MakeRTextInstaller.nsi NSIS script at the root of the project.

Building the macOS application

To build the .app bundle intobuild/install/RText-<version>.dmg:

./gradlew clean build generateMacApp

The generated RText-<version>.dmg can be used to install RText.app to the Applications folder. Note that this app currently isn't signed, so Gatekeeper will likely prevent you from installing. To get around this you'll need to tweak your security policy to allow installing of apps from outside the App Store.