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masinick
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 Posted: Sat May 08, 2004 6:07 pm Post subject: Joe, classic command line text editor |
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Joe has been around for quite some time. It is a very easily customized text editor, and it comes with at least three different keyboard mappings to emulate other existing editors, including jstar to emulate the ancient WordStar editor, jpico to emulate the easy to use Pico editor, and jmacs to emulate the powerful Emacs editor.
Linux Magazine has a quickly downloadable .pdf file that contains a nice article about Joe. You can find it on the page http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/06/Joe.pdf
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/Joe/NotesJoe.NM.html also has a very nice tutorial on using Joe.
If you want something simple, you can invoke Joe as jpico and end up with an editor that's very similar to nano and pico, quite an easy to use command line text editor.
If you've been around a long time and remember how to use the old DOS WordStar editor, then type in jstar as the editor and you'll end up with an interface that's similar to WordStar.
If you are an experienced geek and like Emacs but you want something much smaller and lighter, try typing in jmacs. You'll end up with a Emacs interface to the Joe editor.
Joe is therefore very configurable, yet it's approachable and fairly easy to use. It runs on lots of systems and doesn't take up many resources.
Joe has been around a long time and it is not changed very often. Recently some syntax highlighting features were added, the first change in years. Joe has aged well. If you want a fast, flexible editor, Joe is it.
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masinick
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| Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 7:46 pm Post subject: More on Joe, and a few words on Jed |
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The official documentation for Joe - and this one is my favorite, the Emacs version, Jmacs, is available here: http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/jmacs1.html
I know that for every day use, most people use a full screen graphical editor where you can copy, cut, select, and paste using the mouse. That is all well and good, and for 90-95% of tasks, that is probably all you need. Kate or Kedit in KDE, gedit in GNOME, or a truly lightweight, notepad like editor like Mousepad or Leafpad work real well for that.
But there are those times where your GUI won't work. like when a new X server comes out and you "upgrade", only to find different conventions used. Until you sort that out, you are temporarily stuck. In such cases, command line use of Vi, in the form of Vim, become REAL handy. But some people don't like Vi or Vim and either can't or don't want to figure it out. Remembering five non intuitive commands is asking too much when under duress. So another alternative is needed. Nano and pico are two common alternatives. A more powerful alternative is Joe.
I like Jed, too. It can be used on Windows as a GUI editor and on Linux as either a GUI or command line editor. It behaves a lot like Emacs, but if you use the GUI version you do not have to worry about that.
With Joe, you can use multiple editing styles. All of them can take advantage of menus in case you don't want to learn commands, and even if you do use commands, it can help you remember.
Joe is almost as easy as Nano to use at a basic level, but far more powerful if you really get into it. Same goes for Jed as well. You can use the real basic form and use both of them as little more than a command line version of a notepad editor, but if you can remember just a few commands you can do a whole lot more with either of these editors than you can with nano or pico.
They are both small footprint editors, though, so they invoke and run well on any hardware. |
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Pet3M0ss
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tlmiller
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| Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:02 am Post subject: |
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| Since taking RH033, I've found that I've become quite accustomed to vi, but previously, I couldn't agree more with the dislike of vi. The first time I ever used it I couldn't even figure out how to get OUT of it!!! I would do anything to avoid it for the longest while, and it wasn't until I took that class that I would confidently start it up.
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masinick
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| Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:40 am Post subject: Vi is a special breed |
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| tlmiller wrote: | | Since taking RH033, I've found that I've become quite accustomed to vi, but previously, I couldn't agree more with the dislike of vi. The first time I ever used it I couldn't even figure out how to get OUT of it!!! I would do anything to avoid it for the longest while, and it wasn't until I took that class that I would confidently start it up. |
Any editor in the Vi family, whether the original Vi, the Elvis editor found in Slackware many moons ago, or the Vim most commonly found in distros today, are among the most powerful text editors in existence, but they are neither initially intuitive nor automatic to figure out. Vim helps you out because there is a help system and a tutor built in, unless your distro, for some reason, does not include it. Vi, and especially Vim and Gvim, the graphical version of Vim, are fast, extensible, meaning you can customize them, and once you learn the tricks, you may find them actually faster for primary editing tasks than anything else.
I happen to be more of an Emacs conehead than a Vi one, but I know and use both of them, and both of them are extremely powerful and extensible. There have long been multiple editors written in Emacs Lisp, including at least three dialects of Vi, but recently someone tackled writing a Emacs emulator in Vim script language; called Vimacs, it actually works.
Jed and Joe are two really fast editors that can be made to have a Emacs like feel, but you can make them look and run like other editors, too, because both of them have a scripting language.
Vile is a VERY interesting text editor. For the most part, it has the finger feel of a Vi editor. Underneath, there are elements of a Micro Emacs engine in certain parts of the code. As a result, you can make Vile work like Vi but you can, if you are familiar with Micro Emacs, also run commands familiar to that editor.
Speaking of Micro Emacs, it is not the same as GNU Emacs, though there are some similarities. Micro Emacs is a lot smaller than GNU Emacs, not as functional in some of the other wild and crazy things you can do with GNU Emacs, but extremely fast and useful as an ordinary text editor. I understand that Linus Torvalds builds his own flavor of me - Micro Emacs.
In case you can't tell, text editors, Web browsers, and user interfaces in general are a hobby of mine - one reason I try out a lot of distros - to study interfaces. |
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masinick
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| Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:53 am Post subject: We'd have to ask Crouse |
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| Pet3M0ss wrote: | I have used Joe, but not coming to Linux from the shell side, I find all editors a little tricky to use with confidence.
This response was more out of curiosity, masinick. I noticed your original post had 1684 or so reviews without a response  Is that some kind of USALUG record?? |
We would have to ask Crouse to see which topics with zero replies are most read. Thanks, I appreciate the kind words.
Editors are cool tools. They are personal, too. Different people work in many different ways, which is why there are so many different text editors. The ones I first mentioned in this thread, then the ones I have added in my discussions today are particularly notable. They are so extensible that you can make the editor itself behave in many different ways - even like a different editor altogether. Joe is cool - has several different editors within the editor, depending on how you start it up. Jed can be modified with slang scripts to define keys and bind them to different commands. Vim has a script language which has become a programming language in its own right. Emacs Lisp has been a powerful programming language for many years, which is why Emacs is such a wild animal - you can create new things, new programs with it - much more than JUST an editor. |
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tlmiller
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| Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:28 am Post subject: |
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| I tried emacs once too. Since we didn't cover how to use it in our class, the only thing I can say for it that was better than my initial impression from vi is that I was able to get out of it. Then removed it. I like nano, would probably like that joe since it's a nice compromise between nano and vi, and am rapidly beginning to like vi. But that's as far as I'll probably ever progress learning editors. I still a lot of the time end up gedit/kedit'ing files if I only need to add a few lines of text or delete a few lines of text rather than put up with vi.
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masinick
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| Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:48 am Post subject: If you are not doing heavy development, that is all you need |
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| tlmiller wrote: | | I tried emacs once too. Since we didn't cover how to use it in our class, the only thing I can say for it that was better than my initial impression from vi is that I was able to get out of it. Then removed it. I like nano, would probably like that joe since it's a nice compromise between nano and vi, and am rapidly beginning to like vi. But that's as far as I'll probably ever progress learning editors. I still a lot of the time end up gedit/kedit'ing files if I only need to add a few lines of text or delete a few lines of text rather than put up with vi. |
Only people who are constantly writing and editing, either written prose or code, need to have a fancy editor. A simple GUI editor is actually quite powerful too. But the first time you make a major blunder in something, where you messed up 150 instances of something and need to change it, you can easily do such things with Vi or Emacs, something you just cannot do in an editor without some kind of macro or scripting language.
That is where Vi and Emacs REALLY stand out. Try to fix hundreds of errors that match the same pattern. I HATE doing stuff like that in word processors, even ones that have stuff like replace or replace all. It is better than nothing, that is for sure. I do use Notepad like editors for really simple stuff. I have an instance of Mousepad up on my SimplyMEPIS system right now. It is useful when I am creating my mailing list. Nevertheless, if someone writes to me with lots of ALL CAPS WORDS THROUGHOUT THE DOCUMENT, I can run the Emacs command downcase-region after selecting the area I am interested in. I can capitalize sentences or words, I can format, add spacing, all kinds of other useful stuff. I can tranpose letters in case my fumble fingers bumble them. With Emacs, I can even include my own dictionary of automatic corrections, like automatically typing in the if I inaccurately type teh instead. I can turn that feature off if needed, too.
But see, these kinds of things are for people who are constantly editing. For casual use, some of the editors are just plain too intimidating. The one I just mentioned, Mousepad is a really easy GUI notepad editor, perfectly fine for cutting and pasting simple text and just typing away.
If you ever do dig into text editors, I do recommend Emacs, if for no other reason than to have an academic alternative to Vi. You will find Emacs to be a big fat pig if all you use it for is an editor. Vi is much tighter. But if you use Emacs for News, editing directories with the directory editor dired, playing games like "doctor", the Emacs Psychiatrist, displaying a calendar, telling the time, interacting with CVS to manage check in and check out of file changes... that stuff is ideal for Emacs - much more so that JUST text editing alone.
... but like I said, unless you are digging in, advanced text editors are really too overwhelming, especially when there are easy alternatives available. |
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lynch
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tlmiller
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crouse
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d_riordan
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| Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 8:14 am Post subject: |
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| crouse wrote: | | http://usalug.org/vi.html <<<<< For ANYONE wanting to learn vi ... this is a great tutorial. |
Bookmarked! I use vim quite a bit for fairly light weight editing on the console, but many of its more advanced features are still a mystery to me.
Now if someone would just write a decent tutorial/reference for emacs, maybe I'd use that too. (I've tried the built in tutorial, but it's lacking IMO.)
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Pet3M0ss
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| Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007 7:03 am Post subject: |
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I noticed that the www.slackbook.org has an online version of Slackware Essentials Book. Check out Chap 16 (Vi) and Cap 17 (Emacs). IMHO a good nutshell instruction with quick reference to common commands.
http://www.slackbook.org/html/book.html
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masinick
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Probably just because I haven't used it much, but everything seemed very counter intuitive for me. Nano/Pico are great editors as well, and Kate/Kwrite work great for gui based editors. Vi was hard to get used to at first, but it definitely gets easier if you learn one thing every week (keystroke combo's listed on the tutorial), before you know it, you start to really like the power vi gives you at your fingertips 