jEdit OS X startup issue.

Newest OS X Java update breaks jEdit and many other java apps.
2008-09-27

The other day I was upgrading my java, and suddenly the program I probably use the most every day, jEdit suddenly stopped working. After a couple painful days I've gotten it back to 100%. After following this support thread and checking out this blog entry I've found that the following will probably work for you:

rm /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/jedit
cp /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/jedit

If you have jEdit installed in the default location this should work as expected. A similar method should work with other java programs that have stopped functioning with the new update.

The basic problem has to do with symlinks to the latest java application stub. It used to be that you could symlink to the stub, so that you could use whatever was installed on the user's system. Now it seems that there are some problems with the launcher looking for files in the wrong directory, and using the actual stub instead of a symlink is required.

Hope this gets you moving quickly. Thanks to Doug Letterman and 'sbd76' for finding this solution.