Detailed changes can always be found in the Detailed Change Log, but here are some of the major features of this version.
VFS WorkThreads have been rewritten into Tasks, making it possible to completely remove the old "I/O Progress Monitor" and the wasteful space it took up in the Task Monitor. Old deprecated classes related to WorkThread and WorkThreadPool have been removed.
New Plugin Manager option to check for and disable obsolete plugins. Enabled by default, this will ensure that old unsupported plugins do not interfere with the running operation of jEdit.
Added another language to our list of translated languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Czech, Russian, and now Chinese! We are always looking for volunteers to help translate jEdit into Hindi, Korean, or Spanish, or any other language, really! It is fairly easy to add a new translation to jEdit or the plugins.
There is now a new encoding Native2ASCII which collapses unicode escapes in ISO-8859-1 files on read and expands characters that cannot be encoded with ASCII as unicode escapes on write. This encoding is the one Java properties files should be in.