Installing Antelope as a jEdit Plugin
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## Installing Antelope as a jEdit Plugin

You can install Antelope in jEdit by using the Plugin Manager. Just follow the instructions for installing any plugin found in the jEdit help system. This section assumes you'll install Antelope into jEdit by hand because Antelope is updated much more frequently than jEdit's Plugin Central. It's really quite easy:

- Download the Antelope plugin jar file.
- Copy it to jEdit's jar directory.
- Check that ANT_HOME is set as an environment variable.
- Start jEdit.

Note that the Antelope plugin depends on the Console and ErrorList plugins, so you'll need to install those from the Plugin Manager also.

First, download the plugin zip file. Unzip it. The file named Antelope.jar is the plugin jar file.

Second, figure out where to put it. jEdit wants its plugins in one of two places, either $jedit_home/jars or $user_home/.jedit/jars. The best place is $user.home/.jedit/jars.

So where is $user_home? That depends on your operating system.

For Windows 95 and later, it's usually C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername, where yourusername is the name you use to log on to Windows. On my Windows 2000 machine, it's C:\Documents and Settings\danson, so I would copy the jar file into C:\Documents and Settings\danson\.jedit\jars.

For Linux or Unix, $user_home is usually /home/yourusername or /export/home/yourusename. On my Linux box, it's /home/danson, so I would copy the jar file into /home/danson/.jedit/jars.

The third step is letting Antelope know where you have Ant installed. This directory is known as "ANT_HOME". For example, on my Windows 2000 machine, I have Ant installed in c:\apache-ant-1.6.0, so that would be my ANT_HOME. Antelope looks in a few places when it starts:

- First, it looks for a System property named ANT_HOME. You could set a System property on the command-line to start jEdit (something like java -mx64m -DANT_HOME=c:/apache-ant-1.6.0 -jar jedit.jar) or if you're using Windows, you can set something similar in the jEdit launcher tool (Start - Programs - jEdit - Set jEdit Parameters).
- Second, it looks for an environment variable named ANT_HOME. This is actually the preferred method, and is recommended in the Ant installation instructions. How you set an environment variable depends on your operating system, on Windows, go to Start - Settings - Control Panel - System - Advanced - Environment Variables. On Linux or Unix, I'll assume you know what to do.
- If there is no environment variable set, then Antelope looks in the jEdit jars directories. You can copy the files from ANT_HOME/lib to the jEdit jars directory like you did with the Antelope jar file, and jEdit will automatically load them. This wasn't a bad solution with Ant 1.5 as there were only a couple of jars to maintain, but Ant 1.6 comes with about 20 jar files, so it's a bit more cumbersome.
- If Ant is not found in any of these locations, it will ask you.

Once Ant is found, the location will be stored by Antelope for future use. If you want to change the location, use jEdit's "Plugin" menu, then "Plugin Options", then "Antelope" in the plugin list. If you erase the setting found there, Antelope will follow the same procedure to find Ant next time it is started.

As a plugin, Antelope provides two "dockable" windows. Use jEdit's menu "Utilites, Global Options, Docking" to dock the windows. I find it convenient to dock the "Antelope" window on the right, and the "Ant Output" window on the bottom. The "Antelope" window is where you'll see the buttons to run targets, the "Ant Output" windows is where you'll see any output produced by Ant as it runs. Technically, the "Ant Output" window shows anything written to the system standard output stream, so you may see messages produced by other plugins there also.

To reiterate:

- Download the Antelope plugin jar file.
- Copy it to jEdit's jar directory.
- Check that ANT_HOME is set as an environment variable.
- Start jEdit. Dock Antelope.

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