I noticed that jEdit would no longer start on my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5.5. I’d try to run jEdit via Quicksilver as usual, but it wouldn’t open. Double-clicking on the jEdit application icon was just as useless. Nothing happened. I checked for anything that could be blocking it and restarted my laptop with no change. I upgraded to the latest version of jEdit but it still wouldn’t run.
It turns out that the latest Java update from Apple managed to break jEdit’s launch. After a decent amount of Googling, I ran into the solution. Basically, it involves replacing a symlink with its target.
rm /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/jedit cp /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/jedit
And it even came with an explanation:
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.
I decided to copy it here just to improve the odds of finding a solution for the next person. Thanks to those folks who discovered & reported the solution.