Apache NetBeans vs. Emacs vs. SlickEdit vs. jEdit Comparison Chart

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick.

jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. While jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use, it is released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Hundreds of macros and plugins available. Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the "plugin manager" feature. Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode. Highly configurable and customizable. Every other feature, both basic and advanced, you would expect to find in a text editor.