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Comment by glebd | Hacker News Reader

JOE is pretty nice https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/ — a hybrid of WordStar and Emacs, and if you run it with `jstar` you get a pretty authentic WordStar experience which also feels like the earliest Borland Turbo IDEs.

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I used to love JOE! Maybe that's why, because it had echoes of WordStar. I just wrote an article about how I still use the "WordStar Diamond" keys in Linux today: https://benhoyt.com/writings/wordstar-diamond/

Yes! The first word processor I used was Wordstar (under CP/M). My first programming environment was Borland Turbo Pascal. Later, I used "QEdit", which was configurable to use the wordstar keys.

When I finally migrated from DOS to Unix, in the early 90s, I was delighted to discover JOE. It is the first program I install on any new Linux or *BSD box or VM.

JOE has syntax highlighting and several other nice features these days. I have therefore never felt the need to get proficient with vi or emacs.

Great memories there, back in the 90s I used to use joe for everything that wasn't editing code. Mainly because it just isn't good at that, it's more of a "word processing" model, with word wrapping and lack of syntax highlighting, etc.

But for writing text documents? Lovely little editor.

You should try a more recent version of it: sudo apt-get install joe

JOE has syntax highlighting, UTF-8, regex, shell windows, hex editing, incremental search, column/rectangular block, macros..

Are the differences between the modes and their keybindings not documented in the manual?

Probably I'm just stupid and overlooked them, but I really don't see anything.

Yup! I often invoke it with "jmacs" to get the emacs keyboard shortcut set.

native-mode joe is closer to zde/vde than wordstar, although jstar obviously slides that closer to wordstar.

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