When a view is brought to the foreground, jEdit checks if any open buffers were modified on disk by another application. All affected buffers are listed in a dialog box. By default, buffers without unsaved changes are automatically reloaded. This feature can be disabled, or changed to prompt if files should be reloaded first, in the General pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box; see the section called “The Global Options Dialog Box”.

File>Reload can be used to reload the current buffer from disk at any other time; a confirmation dialog box will be displayed first if the buffer has unsaved changes.

File>Reload All discards unsaved changes in all open buffers and reload them from disk, asking for confirmation first.