In order to give the user a helpful error message if the Console plugin is not installed, your plugin should specify dependency properties. If your plugin's core class is named MyPlugin, the corresponding dependencies might look like so:

plugin.MyPlugin.depend.0=jedit 04.02.99.00
plugin.MyPlugin.depend.2=plugin console.ConsolePlugin 4.2

Note that the current version of the Console plugin requires jEdit 4.2 final or later, so your plugin should also require at least that jEdit version. If a newer version of the Console plugin is available, you can specify higher version numbers than in the example above. However, all the API calls in this chapter are guaranteed to work with the above version, so in most cases you shouldn't worry about it.