IJ_Ed advanced editor for ImageJ

Jérôme Mutterer (mutterer at ibmp dot fr)
CNRS - Institut de Biologie Moléculaire des Plantes
Strasbourg, France.

Built from jEdit, has all jEdit nice features:

• multi-buffer split views
• syntax highlighting
• line numbers
• etc. etc.
• see jEdit website for a full list of features

Three parts were important to have jEdit work properly with ImageJ:

1. IJ_Ed.jar is the ImageJ plugin that starts jEdit
2. A modified version of jEdit that can be called from another java application without spoiling it
3. IJBridge.jar is the jEdit plugin that provides ways to send the edited code back to ImageJ (run the current macro, or install the current macroset)

So far I focused on the ImageJ macro language, but the IJBridge.jar jEdit plugin can be extended to provide other specific mechanisms for java plugins or other scripting languages. See 'Update' section about compiling java plugins.

ijed_download.zip

Extract to the plugins folder, so that you get :

ImageJ/plugins/ijed/
ImageJ/plugins/jedit.jar
ImageJ/plugins/IJ_Ed.jar

Then fix the classpath as explained in the next section.

“IJ_Ed” will be available in the plugins/Editor/ menu.

Two steps are required:

1. copying the files in the ImageJ/plugins/ folder
2. adding the path to a library in the classpath

• All platforms

Download the zip archive from the download section below, and expand it in your ImageJ/plugins/

• Mac OSX

Right click on the application Icon and choose 'Show package content'. 
Navigate to Info.plist entry and add :$APP_PACKAGE/../plugins/jedit.jar 
immediately before the last </string> in the class path.

• Linux:

Editing the ubuntu launcher script to add jedit.jar to the  classpath did not work for me. 
So I put a copy of jedit.jar in ImageJ/jre/lib/ext/

Gabriel Landini sent the following working run script:
cd ~/ImageJ
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0/bin/java -Xmx900m -cp ij.jar:/home/gabriel/ImageJ/plugins/jedit.jar:jimi.jar:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0/lib/tools.jar ij.ImageJ $*

• Windows: Edit the ImageJ.cfg file to include jedit.jar in the classpath

C:\PROGRA~1\ImageJ\
jre\bin\javaw.exe
-Xmx1600m -cp ij.jar;C:\PROGRA~1\ImageJ\plugins\jedit.jar;C:\PROGRA~1\ImageJ\ij.jar ij.ImageJ

• To run the current buffer as an ImageJ macro, choose jEdit/Plugins/IJ_Bridge/Run As IJ Macro, or the run icon from the toolbar

• To install the current buffer's macros or toolset in ImageJ, choose jEdit/Plugins/IJ_Bridge/Install IJ Macro, or the install button from the toolbar

• To compile and run the current buffer's java plugin (must be in ImageJ/plugins/ folder), choose jEdit/Plugins/IJ_Bridge/Install IJ Macro

I found that some parts of this software are licensed under the terms of:

• GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2
• GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.1
• The Apache Software License, Version 1.1

unreleased version 0.09. jEdit→IJ working OK. Matthieu Casanova suggested to start jEdit in server mode.
2009-04-23: version 0.10. P. Evouna provided the ImageJ Macro Language syntax highlighting mode.
2009-04-23: version 0.11. Joachim Wesner suggested to add Save,Compile and Run action.
2009-04-24: new version of the IJBridge.jar jEdit plugin that adds a “Save Compile And Run” java plugin action. Contains syntax highlighting modes for applescript, css, groovy, html, ijmacros, java, javascript, php, python, ruby and xml files. 2009-05-03: added two jEdit macros: long string splitting and run selection

This zip file ijed_macros.zip contains the following files, to be put in ijed/macros/

• A jEdit beanshell macro that clean-splits long strings (suggested by Christopher Coulon)
• A jEdit beanshell macro that runs only the selected text as ImageJ macro (suggested by Miso Mitkovski)

The “Compile and Run” action does not work in Linux. I'll try to fix it.