Jedit has a useful feature that if it crashes (or my system crashes), then the next time I start jedit, it will see my autosave files, tell me that it crashed, and offer to load the autosave files instead of the manually saved (old) versions.

When I first installed it, I had it assigned as the default program to handle txt files. However, I discovered that when I already had it running, and had some unsaved (but autosaved) files open, then if I tried to open a txt file from windows explorer, then a second instance of jedit would start, and tell me that it thought it had crashed (because it found autosave files), and offer to load the autosave files. This worried me because it apparently was unaware of (or unable to coordinate with) the instance of jedit which was already running, and I was afraid that in that case, one instance might clobber file changes made by the other instance. To be safe, I changed the default program for txt files to wordpad, to prevent a second instance of jedit from starting when I open txt files from windows explorer.

Why does jedit not recognize that the presence of autosave files is due to an already-running other instance of jedit rather than due to jedit having crashed?

In order to avoid the problem, is there a way I can set jedit as the default program for txt files but have it open those files in the already-running instance rather than open a new instance?