Preface
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## Preface

No longer will jEdit be called "pre" or "final": instead, we are moving over to straight-decimal x.y.z version numbering scheme.

jEdit is a very mature text editor, and has gone through a very interesting phase of development. Left in a "prerelease" stage for about four years, it's had a long time to solifidy. Many of the original developers, including Slava Pestov, have stopped working directly on jEdit. Fortunately, because of the wonderful nature of open source, there are more and more eyeballs on this code than ever! We have received contributions of plugins, bugfixes, refactoring, and enhancements from around the globe, and our host, sourceforge.net reports that there are on average at least a half-million downloads per year, and this has been true for the entire millenium.

In terms of actual releases, there was a bit of a lull while Slava's absense was sinking in among the other members of the community, but in 2006, thanks to their generous donations of time, effort, and coding skills, we started releasing regular prereleases again, fixing bugs in the core and each other's plugins, making jEdit more stable, coherent, and useful than ever.

The thing that really excites me is seeing members of the community get more actively involved in improving jedit or its plugins. The core is huge, and there are over 164 plugins, so there is an endless source of things to do. I anticipate that the trackers will always have many open issues, but I see many of the old ones finally being closed, and that is very much satisfying. I can say with complete confidence that 4.4 is an improvement over 4.2 in every possible way. I hope that after you read this document, you will think so too, and perhaps want to join in on the development of future versions of jEdit or its plugins.

I watch the tracker traffic (`jedit-devel`) and commit logs (in the `jedit-commits` mailing list) with fascination, learning new Java tricks, or new jEdit tricks. It's quite satisfying to be this intimate with code that I find I am using every day. I feel I am on a first-name basis with all of the active committers, and I've given and/or received help from every one of them. While it is true, there are parts of it that could be designed a little better, it is still the best open source editor I've seen. Thanks to the plugins themselves, because they are broken up into neat little packages, it is easier for us to isolate and fix bugs. As long as I am using it, I will be compelled to fix bugs that annoy me, be they in the core, or any of the plugins I happen to use.

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