Joe's Own Editor 4.0 Released
sourceforge.net
sourceforge.net
I used Joe a lot, then Nano. Yes, Nano. I once had a (prominent?) figure in the startup community walk past my desk and tell me he'd fire me if I worked for him, because it couldn't be productive to work in an editor like that. To this day I think it's fine, although I've moved on to favor IDEs for static analysis friendly languages (Java, C#, and friends) and Sublime Text for everything else.
Anyway, thanks for Joe. It was instrumental in getting me into programming and I think I very well might have been scared off if I had to use Emacs or Vim to start. I just downloaded 4.0 and tried it out. Like others in the thread, it's come right back to me. I might switch for a while!
Earlier in my professional career, I resisted IDE's in favor of a customized nedit. I have since moved on to Eclipse, WebStorm and Sublime Text.
I do have fond memories of coding with joe and jed on VT terminals, though.
That was a truly awful thing for someone to say. We all go through learning phases, and making fun of someone for the technology they choose to use is just hateful, not to mention discouraging.
I originally learned on Solaris using pico (as part of a college "intro to UNIX" class), and I'm highly thankful for the person who sat next to me and suggested I check out Debian. I used nano when I first installed Linux, because nano-tiny was the default editor on Debian. I knew enough vi to hit :q! or ZZ if I somehow ended up in nvi. Much later, I learned Emacs, on the assumption that I needed to learn one of the big two programmer's editors, and I couldn't stand the modal nature of vim; to this day my .emacs enables CUA mode. Much later I learned vim, partly by way of shared screen sessions with a proficient vim user.
Or hey, if you really want to make fun of my past technology choices, I used to write VBA code 15 years ago, which in the snarking order of overly opinionated geeks probably puts me somewhere between PHP programmers and COBOL programmers. Some of that VBA code is still in use today, which is both an amusing and terrifying thought.
I've had a long and winding path to the current set of technologies I use. I'm sure many other people have similarly long and winding paths, and weren't always using the same set of technologies they do today. If anything, that provides a level of breadth.
(On occasion I've been known to snark at specific technologies, such as PHP or MySQL. That doesn't mean I'm going to make fun of people who use those technologies productively, especially when learning. There is a time for offering constructive suggestions about alternative technologies and the features and benefits of using them; certainly if someone seeks out advice for what to use then by all means recommend your preferred technologies and give reasons for those recommendations. But drive-by snarkage and belittling about someone's choice of editor? That's just wrong.)
It's stuck with me ever since, though, so it seems to have meant something.
Over the years thinking about it lent me the same perspective you have. I used to be one of those really annoying anti-X (PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) zealots. I thought it was funny but that experience made it clear to me that random snark can really hurt. Plenty of people use plenty of "joke" technologies to make real software people use every day, and snarking out on them is unlikely to help. I'll still steer people clear of MongoDB especially, but it's in more constructive ways and with a more clear eye towards actual use case.
FWIW, Homebrew is still at Joe 3.7. The 4.0 source release compiles fine on MacOS/Homebrew if you set LC_ALL=C to work around some sed problem.
Hmm, I used autoconf from Ubuntu 14.04. Maybe there is an issue with it in MacOS.
joe was the first editor I used when I tried Linux for the first time. vim and Emacs seemed terrifying back then, and I needed very little features. Just being able to edit config files.
The Wordstar shortcuts somehow are still in my muscle memory. I will definitly try and see how joe fares under my current requirements for a text editor.
This is exciting!
I started programming in DOS in the 90s, and just hitting Ctrl-H in joe makes my muscles remember the most-used chords... A very funny flashback.
At Uni we were brought up on JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs).
This is very convenient, as joe/jmacs is about 1/16th the binary size of emacs.
There are also soft links to jpico and jstar and rjoe. jpico and jstar I assume run with bindings for pico and wordstar. I don't know what rjoe does.
I stopped using it when I had to telnet frequently to a server to do some remote work (circa 1998) and the only editor that was installed was vi. As vi was everywhere and joe wasn't I just switched to vi (and eventually to vim).
I'm happy joe is still around :)
It has got just the right set of features to be a proper Unix editor that is good at editing and delegating other stuff to other utilities. I love the run shell in this buffer feature. The only thing I wish for is a soft-wrap feature, since I deal with long lines quite a lot.
Syntax highlighting messes that up. But you can shut it off by editing the config files.