Joe's Own Editor 3.6 A Free ASCII-Text Screen Editor for UNIX by Joseph Allen (<= 2.8) Marek 'Marx' Grac (=> 2.9) by Joseph Allen again (=>3.0) Get it from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor If you have questions, problems or suggestions, Use sourceforge: mailing list, bug tracker, discussion groups. JOE is the professional freeware ASCII text screen editor for UNIX. It makes full use of the power and versatility of UNIX, but lacks the steep learning curve and basic nonsense you have to deal with in every other UNIX editor. JOE has the feel of most IBM PC text editors: The key-sequences are reminiscent of WordStar and Turbo-C. JOE is much more powerful than those editors, however. JOE has all of the features a UNIX user should expect: full use of termcap/terminfo, excellent screen update optimizations (JOE is fully usable at 2400 baud), simple installation, and all of the UNIX-integration features of VI. JOE's initialization file determines much of JOE's personality and the name of the initialization file is simply the name of the editor executable followed by "rc". JOE comes with four "rc" files in addition to the basic "joerc", which allow it to emulate these editors: JPICO - An enhanced version of the Pine mailer system's PICO editor. JSTAR - A complete imitation of WordStar including many "JOE" extensions. RJOE - A restricted version of JOE which allowed you to edit only the files specified on the command line. JMACS - A GNU-EMACS imitation which is about one order of magnitude smaller than real GNU-EMACS. Features: JOE has a well thought-out user-interface with great attention to detail. The Page Up and Page Down functions do not move the cursor relative to the edges of the screen. Left and Right arrow keys work at the beginning and ends of lines. The cursor can move past the ends of lines without jumping, but also without inserting or deleting extra spaces at the ends of lines. Control characters and characters above 127 can be displayed and entered- even ^Q and ^S. The cursor's row and column number can be displayed in the status line. The key layout is made to reduce terminal incompatibility nonsense. ^Q and ^S are not used and both ^H and DEL are mapped to backspace. Case does not matter in key sequences- ^K E, ^K e, and ^K ^E are each mapped to the same function. The arrow keys and PageUp, PageDown, Home, End, Insert and Delete keypad keys are read from the termcap entry and are assigned to the proper functions. A simple initialization file, similar to Semware's Q-EDIT, allows key-bindings, simple macros and help windows to be defined. JOE has full termcap/terminfo support and will work on any terminal. JOE has the best screen update optimization algorithm available. It uses VT100-style scrolling regions the way they are supposed to be used (I.E., without building insert and delete line functions out of them) and has a powerful line shifting (insert/delete character) algorithm which works even if text goes past the ends of lines. JOE has deferred screen update to handle typeahead and uses the baud rate reported by 'stty' to ensure that deferral is not bypassed by tty buffering. JOE has multiple windows and lacks the confusing notion of a named buffers. You just have files and windows. When there are more windows than can fit on the screen, the Goto-Next-Window function scrolls through them. The same file can have multiple windows opened on it. JOE has VI-style unix integration. You can filter a highlighted block through a UNIX command. Also, each place in joe which accepts a file name (including the command line) will also accept: !command to pipe into or out of a command >>filename to append to a file filename,start,size to edit a portion of a file/device - to use stdin or stdout File names on the command line may be preceded by +nnn to start editing at a specified line. JOE has shell windows. You can run a shell in a window and any output from commands run in the shell gets stored in a buffer. JOE has an orthogonal event-driven design. Each prompt is actually a normal edit buffer containing a history of all of the responses entered for that prompt. You can use all of the normal edit commands to create file names and search strings. You can use the up arrow key (or search backwards and any other appropriate edit command) to go back through the history of previous responses. Prompts are reentrant- meaning that edit commands which require prompts can still be used inside of prompts. JOE has TAB-completion and file selection menus. If you hit tab in a file name prompt, the name is either completed or a menu of possible matches appears. JOE stores edit files in a doubly linked list of gap buffers which can spill into a temporary file. You can edit files of any size up to the amount of free disk space and there are no line-length restrictions. Since the buffering system is block-based, JOE will incur only a minimum of swapping on heavily loaded systems. When you ask for help, one of six small help reference cards appears on the screen and remains while you continue to use the editor. Here is the first help card: CURSOR GO TO BLOCK DELETE MISC EXIT ^B left ^F right ^U prev. screen ^KB begin ^D char. ^KJ reformat ^KX save ^P up ^N down ^V next screen ^KK end ^Y line ^T options ^C abort ^Z previous word ^A beg. of line ^KM move ^W >word ^@ insert ^KZ shell ^X next word ^E end of line ^KC copy ^O word< ^R retype FILE SEARCH ^KU top of file ^KW file ^J >line SPELL ^KE new ^KF find text ^KV end of file ^KY delete ^_ undo ^[N word ^KR insert ^L find next ^KL to line No. ^K/ filter ^^ redo ^[L file ^KD save JOE has a powerful set of editing commands suitable for editing both text files and programs: - UTF-8 support - Syntax highlighting - search and replace system, including powerful regular expressions (including matching of balanced C expressions). - tags file search - paragraph format - undo and redo - position history allows you to get back to previous editing contexts and allows you to quickly flip between editing contexts - multiple keyboard macros - block move/copy/delete/filter - rectangle (columnar) mode - overtype/insert modes - indent/unindent - goto matching ( [ { - auto-indent mode Plus many options can be set: - can have EMACS-style cursor re-centering on scrolls - characters between 128-255 can be shown as-is for non-English character sets - Final newline can be forced on end of file - Can start with a help screen on - Left/Right margin settings - Tab width - Indentation step and fill character