jEdit, force quit and the world's most advanced operating system

Recently I've been looking for a good text editor on OS X (as XCode just didn't seem to cut it), specifically to write numerical simulations in Fortran. Since this isn't one of the mainstream languages for computer programmers, and I like a usable GUI, it was a bit difficult to find a really suitable one. It had to have customizable syntax highlighting, but beyond that I didn't need much. Browsing the ol 'net I found jEdit, a sleek Java based text editor that claimed to work with Fortran and also be customizable. From the beginning it worked great on my Mac (OS 10.3.9), except for one simple but really annoying bug, which I will get to in a minute. jEdit works great with Fortran, is simple but meets my needs, looks and works the same across platforms (since it is Java based) and has numerous plugins. My favorite is jDiff, which graphically compares two files and shows the differences.

The bug, however, still remained. What would happen is this: after using jEdit for awhile, with the Mac OS plugin installed and set to put the jEdit menu bar in the OS X menu bar (as is usual with Mac applications), the menus would cease working, essentially disabling the program (I hear jEdit might work from the command line in this state, but that's still not acceptable behavior). I would have to force quit and relaunch the program, with the potential for losing some work. But, through the magic of the internet I found a solution. It turns out the problem is not jEdit but OS X. The world's most advanced operating system (at least version 10.3.9 with Java 1.4.2) has a bug in Java. Turning off the option to put jEdit menus in the Apple menu bar seems to fix everything, and I'm back in love with jEdit. A simple fix, but to me, a mere engineer with little real programming knowledge, it was a bear to find.