Basics of writing plugins for Jedit - sas

Question

Can anyone direct me to a tutorial on writing plugins for Jedit? I have a pipedream of using Jedit as an editor for SAS. Currently, it does syntax highlighting, but I feel it is or could be made better by fleshing out the ideas better.
A couple questions:
Can you enable tab completion in Jedit?
Can you specify "environments" that begin and end with certain syntax? (For instance, the word "keep" makes sense between the lines data xxx; and run; but not between proc sort data=xxx; and run; So highlighting it there would be counter-instructive to inexperienced coders.
Can you store variables in a work place and reference them from a drop down menu (such as variable names in a dataset)
Can you execute code from the shell/terminal and pipe .log files back into the Jedit message window?

Answer 1

Are you talking about something like Microsoft's Intellisense or autocomplete? If so, a poor-man's approximation to auto-complete is to use the keyboard shortcut ctrl+b after typing in part of the word. It will complete the word based on all the words from all buffers that are open. See this questions for more on autocomplete.
In your syntax highlighting, you can create delegate syntax for different chunks of code so that it will be highlighted according to different rules. grep in your jedit's mode directory for "delegate".
Not exactly sure what you want, but jedit does keep track of a bunch of your latest copies from the text. Emacs calls this a "kill ring". For my jedit setup, I have Paste Previous... bound to ctrl+e ctrl+v. I believe that is the default shortcut binding. This will show you your last ~20 copies of text chunks and you can select which copy text chunk you want to use.
Yes, you can execute tasks in the shell and pipe them back into jedit. See this question. The following is how I do bk edit and reload a buffer. It doesn't get output from the shell, but it does execute a shell command:
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;
import java.io.File;
File f = new File(buffer.getPath());
String SCCS_path = f.getParent()+"/SCCS";
String bk_path = "/usr/local/bin/bk";
if ( !new File(SCCS_path).exists()) {
bk_path = "/usr/bin/bk";
}
Runtime.getRuntime().exec(
bk_path+ " edit "+
buffer.getPath());
Thread.currentThread().sleep(2000);
buffer.reload(view);
Btw, macros are very powerful in jedit. You can record what you are doing in jedit with Macros->Record Macro...and it will generate the equivalent script.