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JOE Hits 3.0
orasio writes " Joe's Own Editor , a unix editor very much like the old Turbo-Pascal 4 editor, or WordStar, used and enjoyed by us console freaks who still miss the old DOS days, and cannot finish understanding vi's modes, has been revamped, adding syntax highlighting and internationalization support after many years without new features. The Sourceforge project is open for contributors since a year ago, but this is the first major feature improvement, that brings new life to JOE as a neat console-based programmer's editor." Joe is one undervalued program -- less arcane than vi, less cumbersome than emacs.
Or something similar. Joe's editor still sucks. I can't believe -- it's 2004 and with NCURSES no one has made a drop-down menu driven editor YET???
Well yeah since it now has Unicode support. Which is quite handy if you need to edit an XML document, HTML or something else with accents.
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JOE isn't.
So when I learned vi, I could use the knowledge on every Unix system I've ever been on. That alone makes it more useful than JOE.
JOE's really JAE.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
does it have a calendar, calculator, email-client and of course tetris build in?
Make that Turbo Pascal 3 which has the wordstar-like editor. Version 4 and later had a full blown GUI, which got later replaced by Borlands TurboVision IDE. Which made it, at least for me, the best CUI there was.
bash$
all hell is about to break loose. Authors should know never to put vi and emacs in the same sentence especially on slashdot.
I want Qedit for unix. It's macros were extremely usable on the fly and I've found nothing else that balance of power and features that it had.
Column copy, split windows, multiple macros that could be quickly defined by a simple to use keystroke recorder. Completely configurable. Oh, and fast and small.
I've tried most of the unix terminal editors. I end up using either vi or nano.
plurvert
Everyone should use Joe because CTRL-k-d is so much easier and more intuitive than ESC :wq!
Joe was a nice alternative for DOS refugees when vi was the only other choice, but X-windows based editors make everything nicer...try middle click cut-and-paste for starters.
Unless we are all sitting at green Wyse 50 terminals, why are we still so married to command line editors? I am guilty of it too. vi is my God.
realistically, how many ppl use Joe?
Yes I've used wordstar in past. And Joe as well. But it seems to me the world has moved far far ahead in the last few years. Sure, vi and emacs lovers wouldnt even think of using any other editor, but IMO, for any serious editing purposes there already are a variety of editors available.
So perhaps, this is news for those who get a nostalgic feeling about the good-old-days. Maybe some will even d/l and give it a go, but the very fact that the this is the first major feature improvement even though the SourceForge project has been open for contributors for over a year, speaks volumes about its usage, demand and popularity.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
UNIX isn't.
So when I learned Windows, I could use the knowledge on every computer I've ever been on. That alone makes it more useful than UNIX.
Cannot believe the bunch of negative comments on Joe... what are you trolling about? In the old times, for most people getting into Linux from DOS, JOE was the only editor worth to be relied on. vi was cryptic as hell and emacs was... emacs.
Long life dear old JOE!
---
All my submissions to Slashdot rejected... and proud of it!
Later I had an affair with Jed and found its syntax hiliting to be a bless. And, I could figure out how to get the background black!
Now, I've grown up and am much to comfortable to develop in anything less than a good IDE.
Give me CygnusEd or give me death! Now there was a text editor.
BTW, had to smile at the end of the editorial - as if anything could be more arcane than vi and/or more cumbersome than EMACS!
ah well, at least this would bring some action to an otherwise slow day at /. :-)
*ducks*
http://efil.blogspot.com/
that's a turnoff for a start... and an awfull lot of the younger slashdotters will be going "Wordstar"??? Yes kids... it was big but Wordstar failed to keep up in the feature race back in the days of Wordperfect for Dos etc... I use nano and or pico myself...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
ctrl-k-d is not intuitive at all.
ctrl-s is, like 's' for 'saving'
Dude, if Windows is everywhere you go, I simply don't want to hang out with you.
%subj%
vim is upward compatible to vi.
So if you master vim you can edit with vi. vi is on every unix box, even on the most "naked" ones.
In addition, vi runs on practically any terminal and any connection, even when logged in from half around the world through several "hops". (I'm typing this on an old Ampex terminal (vt 100 like) via a 9600 Baud connection.)
# vim works like you think.
Many commands are "mnemonic". In a recent post, Randy has put it quite nicely:
As I said earlier, vi works like I think. I think "replace this word with that one;" "delete this line;" "yank this paragraph and put it down there;" "move there and insert a word;" "format this paragraph." Vi provides commands that map to how I think. Some of the time I'm just typing in text without editing it, but normally I'm editing text. I tend to write something, then go back and make it perfect. I prefer to copy something that is already there and then modify it to be what I need. This expresses very well what I believe has been a major design goal of vi!
# Now for the modal/modeless controversy.
If you really think about it, it boils down to the following: it's a matter of how you define "modal"/"modeless"; in other words: if vim is modal, so is emacs - if emacs is modeless, so is vim.
The reason: in emacs you are by default in "insert" mode; you have to type "ctrl-m
While programming, you are at least half of the time in command mode (if you are an Emacs user you might not be aware of that because nobody calls it like like that). The difference between Vim and Emacs is that most most Vim commands are mnemonic and need much less modifier keys, such as Ctrl, Alt, etc.
# I believe that modal editors are more efficient for programming (and similar tasks, like writing latex).
This is because I find myself much more often editing text which is already there, rather than producing new text which hasn't been there before.
This goes well with the observation, which someone reported in the comp.editors news group about joint strain. I almost get joint strain myself when I see emacs users holding down the ctrl or alt key all the time with their pinky or thumb
# I'm not sure what the reason is, but I've never seen emacs users who actually used all those feature which emacs-the-editor offers. (At the office, I'm surrounded by emacs and nedit users
I suspect, this is because it's simply just too difficult to remember all those ctrl-alt chords.
# Speed: CPU-wise, vim is still by far more efficient than joe.
Try running joe on an SGI Indy! Or on a PC/286!
Clearly GUI editors aren't much use until you can get X running. I use vi my self, but none of the existing Linux text mode editors use the "standard" keyboard shortcuts such as cntl-c for copy. To old win/dos users I would recommend pico as the least esoteric of the non-X editors. Does anyone know of a win98 edit.com clone for linux?
I think it is. I never knew about this project until now, and was quite afraid I was going to have to learn a new ide when I wanted to return to programming.
There are those of us who consider the turbo pascal interface an extension of our fingers, because we used it so heavily back in the day.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I tried it. It's useless.
No indent assist, no syntax highlighting, and no interface to the C compiler.
The old hands among us will remember and still have the hidden ability of WordStar keystrokes 'programmed' into our fingers. While many of us have moved on to more powerful editors, we still appreciate that Wordstar like editors give efficient and competent editing capabilities in a small package. There are many of us that don't like drop down menus since we actually spend time writing code and find the action of hunting a mouse menu cumbersome.Deriding these tools because they are DOS like is irrelevant
While I don't often use it, Joe is a good example of this class of editor and I know many people who enjoy using it. While I am firmly in the Vi camp, I enjoy the fact that they have the choice to use a tool that suits them.
However, with the addition of syntax colouring, it may well become my editor of choice (instead of nedit) for when I'm doing multiplatform work and the practical and psychological leap of hopping from a WhineDoze box with Visual Studio to a linux box with Vi (utterly different paradigm) causes tangled fingers (and nerves :) )
(Please feel free to donate large sums to pay for my treatment when windows finally drives me nuts)
On a more general /. rant, over the last few years more an more trolls have invaded our forum. Too many socially defective individuals think that purile comments and insults are somehow witty, even though they have nothing of value to add to the discussion. All too often I see the hard work of developers who are donating their creations to our community belittled by people who I doubt even have the skills of a script kiddy.
Please people, if you have nothing of value to say, then just don't say it.
I must remember to add context when replying to a stupid troll who is about to be modded down.
And to take control of slashgrot to remove this post limit threshold. I mean, what is it with this site? They come up with an idea to prevent abuse, and whether it works, or not, they stick with it.
I used to use JOE but moved to vi when I found myself working on more JOE-less machines. I used because it had the Wordstar keys I was used to from the DOS editor I used at the time. There are still a lot of people out there with DOS skills who find life difficult when moving to a Linux or similar environment. For many this might seem like a retrograde step, but I have often wished that there was a port of the DOS 5 Edit interface on a Linux editor, complete with clunky MS style menu system. If people are to be encouraged to move operating systems, a few familiar looking tools would help them along their way.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Unless we are all sitting at green Wyse 50 terminals, why are we still so married to command line editors?
Personally I like the fact that I can just download Putty and SSH into a familiar environment. Special purpose GUI editors are usually great for a given task, but nothing beats a properly configured general purpose text-based editor at random editing tasks.
.: Max Romantschuk
For the same reason everyone prefers shellscripting instead of a visual development environment, prefers a good comfortable shell to a file explorer, prefers multiple separate windows instead of MDI, etc. Everyone is just used to it?
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CTRL-c to exit without saving ...
CTRL-k, s save
CTRL-k, x exit and save
CTRL-k, b start block
CTRL-k, k end blow
CTRL-k, c copy/paste block
CTRL-k, f find
vi has a steep learning curve, no onscreen help, it trapped me too many times for me to give it a chance whe I first started out.
Joe was the only one besides pico with on screen help that I could find in my early slackware days. It stuck and I still use it all the time. In the mean while I've still learned enough vi to use it when I have to.
God, root, what is the difference?
I prefer fte.
It's not a clone but mcedit is pretty nice. It's included with the mc program which is also a nice file manager.
Jargon file: :joe code: /joh' kohd`/ n. 1. Code that is overly {tense} and
unmaintainable. "{Perl} may be a handy program, but if you look at the
source, it's complete joe code." 2. Badly written, possibly buggy code.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Can it corrupt EOL characters like notepad can on WinXP?
try it: type a few lines in notepad, and then use Ctrl-Leftarrow to go back to the end of a previous line. start typing again, and presto, you've successfully split the CR from the LF.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
There really is no shortage of cross-platform editors available -- it's mostly the IDE addicts that risk being locked into a platform-specific editor.
I use vi-derivatives like vim everywhere. There are no shortage of Win32-based implementations, both for text window and for GUI use.
GNU Emacs is also on any platform I've ever used, and MicroEmacs was almost as portable.
Then there are multi-platform IDE's like Eclipse or SunONE Studio.
I really don't understand why people lament when editors don't have more active support and new features. There just isn't much need for more editors unless someone comes up with a truly unique approach to manipulating text.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I use mcedit contained in Midnight Commander, more nostalgia and userfriendliness than either Joe or Pico. It also has a nice blue color which remind me of the days of dos edit or wp5.1. Screenshot here.
Pico, pico, pico!
Intellectual Property
Intellectual: of the mind
Property: that over which one has control
All that is very nice, but everyone knows real programmers use MS Word.
CTRL-k, x exit and save hmm I wonder if that makes sense, exit and then save ;)
Why does it have to become a VI versus JOE issue? I've used VI and JOE and my personal preference is JOE. Even if JOE isn't on every single *nix box it town, personally I'm glad to hear about the new release and I'll sure be using it.
Free Firefox news reader.
"cannot finish understanding vi's modes"?
Give over, man. It has *two* modes! You can always get back to the default mode by hitting escape.
Even iPod has 2 modes (wheel fer scrolling / wheel fer volume)
Now Emacs, that's another matter. I've put serious effort into learning Emacs on three separate occasions in the last 10 years, and every time I gave up because even the simplest thing requires you to remember a seriously obscure series of keystrokes.
-sigh- should have learned not to join editor flamewars by now.
EDLIN!
Enough said.
"Get Moose and Squirrel"
If you load a file with non-BMP characters in it they will come out as garbage. If you try to input any such characters it will mess up every single characters except those with a code point less than 128.
However, Editors like Joe still have their little niche in the software ecosystem since they are small (not sure how big the new one is yet, hope it doesn't make this comment look foolish by dwarfing Emacs
Much as I like Vi, sometimes there are editing tasks that are more intuatively done in Nedit or Joe
Regarding Emacs users only using a subset of commands, what is wrong with this? In fact, how many Vim users know or use all the commands? Like Emacs, it is safe to say that some commands are little enough used, or complex enough to confuse and lead people to solve the problem another way. For a normal mortal example, take regexes. I have used Vi and Unix style regexes almost every day for the last 15 years. Even so, I still have cause to stop and think about some solutions. Some incantations probably do look like they should be done at midnight under a full moon
My argument with an editor has always been practicality. If you can use a subset to get your job done, then why worry is you don't learn anything else?
BTW, nano is the editor of choice in the Gentoo setup. Good for them.
I didn't get the job...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Clearly GUI editors aren't much use until you can get X running. I use vi my self, but none of the existing Linux text mode editors use the "standard" keyboard shortcuts such as cntl-c for copy. To old win/dos users I would recommend pico as the least esoteric of the non-X editors. Does anyone know of a win98 edit.com clone for linux?
Actually, for Windows users migrating over to *nix, 'ee' [easyeditor] would be much more intuitive. The only problem [as I see it] with ee is the different implementations between different platforms--different control key sequences for the same action, depending upon OS.
Why is that?
Should that not be 'reel programmers', after they have run the spool chucker ?? :)
Many years ago a colleague remarked that the lack of a good editor was the one thing holding Unix back and I had to agree. I've been using vi for over 21 years and I only use what I need and no more. Joe and basic emacs demand piano virtuoso skills and I can only play plectrum guitar, not having developed the dexterity with the right hand digits. I could in 5 minutes teach anyone to use the MVS editor SPF which was also ported to DOS as SPFPC. I now have cooledit in the locker for when I need to do some heavy editing, but there must be others providing the same ease of use. Yeeeeeeuuukkkkk!, many Solaris people use "ksh -o vi" to edit the command line, shunning bash, that's on par with texting on a mobile phone, it's a disgusting waste of time.
What, no screenshots? :)
you know something's wrong somewhere when screenshots of a character-based interface are asked for :-
ps: no offence intended
http://efil.blogspot.com/
"Everyone should use Joe because CTRL-k-d is so much easier and more intuitive than ESC :wq!"
[esc] ZZ might do what you want.
"Joe was a nice alternative for DOS refugees when vi was the only other choice, but X-windows based editors make everything nicer...try middle click cut-and-paste for starters."
Try it in GVim.
"Unless we are all sitting at green Wyse 50 terminals, why are we still so married to command line editors?"
Remote sessions for example.
You said it! I find it truly perverse that you need to read a manual, or a tutorial just to use a text editor. This is not rocket science and I've got better things on my mind than how to use the bloody text editor.
Joe was the only one besides pico with on screen help that I could find in my early slackware days. It stuck and I still use it all the time. In the mean while I've still learned enough vi to use it when I have to.
I've learnt enough vi to be able to edit the joe makefile. :-)
--
Simon
before someone mods my previous post as a Troll, I just think we should celebrate choice and diversity rather than turning it into an X versus Y issue. Regardless of whether it's an editor, a browser or a graphics application, let's just be thankful that we have a choice and let's not judge anyone because of the choice they make.
Free Firefox news reader.
Or is it just a slow news day?
That, and the fact that it's 5:00 in the freakin' morning! Man, give it a few hrs - you'll get your SCO update.
less arcane than vi
:wq or just :x...
Yeah, because Ctrl+KX is so much less arcane than
#include "sig.h"
cragen
ps. I now mostly use TextPad for the syntax highlighting, but if JOE has that now, I may be switching back.
Yes, because Word Proccessors and Text Editors are the same thing.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
vi isn't
When i learned ed I could use the knowledge on every unix system, ever, Including embedded systems with single line displays. That alone makes it more useful than vi.
Honestly. Should'nt this one be modded +5 ROFL?
Helo! I'm Ratshnevspsul Hindurishnevstas, I live in NuDelhee and I must strongestly contradict you.
For our work with American banks, we use Jed for text-editioning of account-datas, which is very fast because we being very big compny.
So, in the real wrold, ther are examples of using Jed.
Thank you.
That argument applies to windows, too. Some of us prefer the lesser-known, less avaliable alternatives anyway.
That said, Joe has never been my favourite. It's too easy to crash and it didn't do the things I expected last time I looked at it. I prefer Nedit. For those rare times when an X server isn't avaliable, I'll use the editor in midnight commander - this does not happen often enough that I bother to learn vi.
(to perhaps start a flame war when I'm at it, the way unix fanatics excpect you to re-learn such a simple task as text editing reminds me of how scientology forces people to "re-learn" reading and other basic tasks.Wonder if they do do it for the same reason?)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Great news! Joe's a much better editor than vi and emacs combined, and it's great to see it's getting an update again finally.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
and more intuitive
when are ppl going to realize that 'intuitive' is not an objective standard and that it means different things to different people? Intuitive implies a pre-learned context that not everyone shares. It's juat a fancy way of saying, "I like it!".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Anyone who ever has to work in a cross platform enviroment should at least be able to use vi. This is everywhere.
Personally, I like it but it took some dragging me across the hot coals by one stubborn instructor in a week long class to get me to adopt it. Once I did, I liked it. Now I use GVIM on the PC and vi on the unix platforms. GVIM on the PC is real nice, it has language support and pull down windows. What I'd like to do is learn how to set up XEMACS to run in VI mode so I can get the best of both words- but I am to busy doing work or reading slashdot to learn.
^K-d for "Kommand Done" vs. ":wq!" for "Write and Quit and I really am sure I wanna do that!" This, to me, looks like a draw.
I had to learn vi back in the days of Turbo Pascal 3.x and Wordstar and their famous "diamond" of movement keys, besides arrow keys that did something more useful than putting "escape[A" into the text. And though I found vi rather strange at first, I later got used to its way of working, to the extent of finding a clone that worked on DOS and never looking back. It was nice never having to leave the alphanumeric sections and get confused by hitting Page down instead of Delete.
But the big cinch was the interchanging of Ctrl and Caps lock that took place sometime in the later 80s. Although Caps-Lock is poison for users of vi, the repositioning of the Control key didn't help with the old Wordstar ways either. Though errors tended to be less deleterious than in vi, where "Escape u" usually restored sanity.
It is mostly a matter of mnemonics for either editor, just that those are different.
Congratulations to "JOE" with its version 3 !
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Dude, you can download any editor with in 3minutes.
just ftp/http/wget it from 100000 sources, there are binaries for everything, including dreamcast to your microwave and vacume tubes
VI is everything, god, talk about lazy.
Yes, windows is everywhere, but are you using it?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
There are thousands of them.
jed, joe, ee, emacs, mcedit, nedit, pico, ted, stte, editx, padpaper, led, setedit, and more and more.
Thing is. The *only* editor you are garuanteed to have on any Unix system is vi. While the others might be great, fantastic even, when you've got more than one system and the whizzy editor is not installed on every single one of them, vi is the tool you can rely on. All the others are Just Another Editor.
I did once search far and wide for the one true editor, GUI editors, TUI editors, emacs key bindings, turbovision interfaces, wordstar keybindings etc each time I ended up coming back to vi, so I guess I found it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
That is the question, all right.
A typical Emacs user rates the virtues of their editor as power, extensibility and flexibility.
Those are Unix-type virtues. Over in the GUI desktop world, they don't count for much. What people want is simplicity and discoverability. Multiple ways to do things, ways that are similar between different programs. No macros, no customisation, no syntax highlighting, no language-specific optimisations, because they're not programmers and they're not programming. Thus they don't want or need a programmers' editor. They want a users' editor.
The MS-DOS 5+ editor is a model of these virtues for a text-mode app. It's CUA-compliant, the Wordstar standard for the 1990s and onwards, it can be driven from the keyboard or mouse, as you prefer, using standard commands, and is as close to a Windows (or indeed MacOS) app as you can get in an 80x25 console.
It's good.
And I know of no free xNix product anything like it.
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
The one true editor, PICO !
Do not give in! Listen to the mighty ed!
Gnusay -- for all your talking gnu needs.
Personally, I try to use Vim whenever possible because if I spend 14 hours a day using a mouse for a GUI editor my right wrist aches really badly, whereas just using the keyboard for Vim has much less of an effect. Personally, I'll put up with a steep learning curve if it means I can still move my hands in a few years!
Funny that, replace "text editor" with "operating system" and you've just described the stereotypical Windows zealot.
As with anything, it all comes down to what you determine to be the best tool for the job. If you work with all sorts of *NIX OSes, groking vi is valuable as it is ubiquitous.
An interesting side-effect of using vi is the tie-ins between vi, ed, and sed, as they all use largely the same command set. Knowing how to do something like a search-and-replace in one translates easily to the other two, and vice versa.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Shouldn't every reply to this subject be flamebait?
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
What's worse is when a distro sets $EDITOR or $VISUAL to vi by default, then when something (perhaps unexpectedly) fires up the default editor (eg crontab -e) you get dumped into vi, with no help on what you should do to even exit the program let alone edit the file.
Compare that with something like joe or jove which have at least enough information there to edit & save or cancel the edit.
Personally if I have to use a console editor I prefer ``le'', hit F10 and select what I want from a menu - why should I have to remember arcane commands just to edit a file.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
REDHAT 9
# vim
-bash: vim: command not found
Bugger, im shit out of luck now.
I guess im forced to use joe.
"In vim, you are by default in command mode"
Then its not an editor, its a command shell.
I loved NEDIT, easy to use etc.. but now there is JEDIT , its java based, runs everywhere, no need to recompile and all that crap with X etc... I use it as default in windows too, unless im in VS7.
I never edit 420meg text files in joe, and i dont type more than 100wpm. So CPU usage is hardly a part of the reasoning.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I havent even started understanding vi's modes you insensitive clod!
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
Its only "5.00 in the freakin morning" where you are. This is a global site.
Too bad they have provided only a limited list of syntax files. As an example, there is no syntax highlighting file for C++ programs yet.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
If you were using Debian before Nano was around, that meant you had no Pico to use. Leaving you with the daunting (but powerful) vi or emacs, or the basic and functional joe.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
Not for me it isn't. I'm more familiar than I am with VI than I am with any of those things you mentioned, and I just gave JOE a shot. I was a bit lost (well, relatively speaking. I figured things out, but it was still less intuitive - for me - than VI).
It's a matter of perspective, and that alone, IMO.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Never mind JOE's tenth anniversary...Ninnle just released V3!
Batman would love it!
cat(1)
I once was editing files on a Samba mounted filesystem. Network time outs lead to lost connections and JOE crashing. Users were pretty amazed about "DEADJOE" files in their home directories. :)
Yeah, and like picking the flow control combination wasn't the most asinine idea ever.
Now perhaps not so bad....but back in the days of modems? bleech.
When switching to Un*x/Linux some years ago Joe was a life-saver for me, it was simple, a well known spot on an unfamiliar landscape :-). After a few years with most of the unfamiliarity gone I found myself wanting efficiency/performance in my daily programming, so I tried vim. For weeks, I was feeling very satisfied with my ability to do some basic editing (without using cursor keys, of course :-)), then I realized I didn't like it and I've been an emacs user since.
There is so much to learn, you have to choose wisely. However, if you're serious about programming you will invest much energy over the years in learning an HTML editor, a good C/C++ editor, a docbook editor and perhaps even write your own editors for specific purposes. This realization made me pick kitchen-sink-emacs. But I still do not touch cursor keys.
"Unless we are all sitting at green Wyse 50 terminals, why are we still so married to command line editors?"
Remote sessions for example.
Hello? Heard of this wonderful thing called X? It's, like, a system that can run GUI programs remotely. It's fairly new, only been around twenty or thirty years, I can see how you might have missed it.
I, too, am a vim user. I love it, and find much usefulness stored within its tomes. I've been using it for years on a daily basis.
:P
However: I still find the goddamn "modes" clunky and unweildly. I invariably end up hitting 'i' when I'm already in insert mode, and vice versa - not hititng it when I wasn't in insert mode, becaues I thought I was. Likewise goes for Esc. Something like an alt- prefix to commands would be more useful, I think, and it wouldn't interfere with console breaks and such.
Anyway, YMMV, of course. I'm already ingrained in Vi, so there's really not much point in bitching, I guess.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
5:00 AM? Seems like 17:00 in my timezone...
Joseph H. Allen. He used to be at WPI in the early 90's. Don't know where he's gotten to these days though. He was a big H.P. Lovecraft fan as I recall.
Yes, and we all have blazing fast connections that can handle running GNOME or KDE shit over ssh/X.
When I want to edit a single damn file out on a server somewhere, why the hell would I want to wait 30 seconds for a stupid editor window to open?
(Granted, VFS etc can open the file remotely, but not always available / possible).
I've been waiting for this for a long time ! thanks guys !
Why am I "married" to command line editors? There are really two reasons: Flexibility of context for use, availability in the context I am, and the price of screen real estate.
I'll address these in opposite order (which I think may be in reverse of priorities, but I'm not sure):
A plain xterm with a minimal border takes less screen real estate than a GUI editor. Screen real estate is a limited commodity - I'll do more or less anything to get more space for what I'm actually working on instead of decorations. And what I'm working on is the text I'm editing, not the buttons and menus that sit there.
A "command-line-based editor" (started from command line and run in the same window allows me to edit a file *in the same visual context as I already was*. This means that I have less of context change than if I either start a new window or use an editor launcher to get a buffer in an already running editor.
And finally, a terminal-based editor gives me flexibility to use the same editor in most contexts I use an editor. I can run it in a console to fix up a config file on a machine that hasn't got X yet, I can run it remotely on a server that isn't supposed to have X installed, I can run it on a remote machine I don't trust to have an X connection to my box (as an X connections allows keyboard snooping), I can run it when I sit on a Windows box with no X and should fix an issue with a server for a customer that use Windows desktops and Unix servers, I can run it when there is enough latency for X to be a pain, I can run it against servers where an X based editor takes too much resources (yes, these exists - for instance, I'd feel bad about running an X based editor on the FreeBSD.org servers, for resource reasons), etc, etc, etc.
Basically, there are a couple of direct UI advantages to terminal based editors compared to X based editors, as well as there being a lot of times it just isn't feasible to run an X editor. Until an X editor in itself is noticably better than the terminal based editors (and that day may come, but I don't know of any X based editor that is clearly better) people like me will keep running only terminal based editors, instead of running an X based editor with a side-dish of a *different* terminal-based editor whenever we can't run the X-based one.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Joe isn't an editor for a vi or emacs junkie.
Joe is more an editor for the kind of person who would otherwise use pico. Easy to use, simple on-screen help, not a whole lot of frills or extra learning attached to using it.
edlin.exe?
i'm waiting for version 10!
anyway, thanks for joe!
I know, this is about JOE, not VI, but the submission DOES bring up an almost universal misconception people have about vi.
The whole "insert mode" versus "command mode" thing in vi?
It's a mistake. There is no "insert mode".
VI is a command-oriented editor. You're always entering a command. The "insert mode" is just an incomplete insert command. The command structure of VI is basically a simplified subset of TECO.
Once one quits thinking of it as being in this mode or that mode, and thinks of inserting text as a command, 99% of the problems people seem to have with vi just drop away.
The "Nice Editor" is a wonderful alternative for
people who want a __simple__, but powerful shell based text editor.
Its so friendly it makes nano look unfriendly
It has DOS style drop down menus, CUA key bindings, and can be customized to a great extent.
If you want a reasonable editor that doesn't require giving up your church or reading a fat book to learn how to use:
http://ne.dsi.unimi.it/
It's not emacs, but then emacs is overkill for editing /etc/init.d/firewall on a 486 firewall.
It's not vi, but... I'm not going to incite another flamewar.
It's not Turbo Pascal 3, but then I don't have an XT anymore.
And more importantly, it was part of my first Slackware install, providing a friendly editor to a refugee from MS-DOS.
All Hail Joe!
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
You have just stated just another flame against Emacs, nothing about Joe. Joe is as modeless as an editor gets, you don't need to switch modes to edit your files, but it has some modes for the file manager, and the configuration editor, but you really don't need those, since you can edit /etc/joe/joerc, which doesn't sound so crazy if you are a joe user in the first place. Anyhow, it is great for _my_ generation, those who hate menus, and point-and-clickety things, but won't touch vi with a loong stick, the DOS generation.
JOE isn't.
So when I learned vi, I could use the knowledge on every Unix system I've ever been on. That alone makes it more useful than JOE.
JOE's really JAE.
Windows is everywhere.
Linux isn't.
So when I learned Windows, I could use the knowledge on every Intell system I've ever been on. That alone makes it more usefull than Linux.
Linux's realy MacOS.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
vim is an admission that vi is inadequate for word processing or programming.
vi is on every UNIX machine and (MORE IMPORTANT) it uses the same interface on every UNIX machine. Note: vim is not on every UNIX machine. In fact, its on only a few machines, and used by even less people.
Who cares if vim is better than joe? They're just also rans to people who can't stand using vi or emacs. Joe is not worthy of a slashdot article. People who need a real editor should use a real editor (emacs on unix platforms), not some kludge based on a cryptic, user-unfriendly hack.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Nowadays there are many editors. Feel free to use whatever you like. But fact is that vi has an amazingly powerful way of editing once you have learned it. Unlike emacs you can actually remember the commands, because to do the same in different contexts, you use the same commands with different prefixes.
Learning vi takes some time, but you get something for it. If you have a job without a computer and edit a file once a week or something, then I would recommend joe or nano. But if you edit many text files every day, learning vi is a very useful investment.
In other words, stop whining that vi is not useful for everyone. No editor is. That's why is't good that there are many ;-)
An important question:
When I have multiple buffers open in Vim, if I change something in buffer 1 and then try to go to buffer 2, it prompts me to save, if I don't, it loses the changes. Even if I save, the cursor position, undo history and all that are lost.
Is it possible to make it work like emacs (and any other multi-file editor I have ever used)? I have been looking for a while and I can't find a way to make it do so...
Linux isn't.
:)
Does this makes Windows more useful than Linux? Of course not. Some knowledge of Windows is good due to its onipresence, but your time will be better spent with Linux.
In much the same way, it's good to learn vi for when you don't have emacs
Serious, I don't have any problem in adapting myself to various editors (and keyboards, btw). I'm typing this in my friend's Windows 98, using those cumbersome Control-C/Control-V thingies. At work I'll use emacs for programming, mail and text writing, and vim for config files. I even use ed sometimes (just for fun).
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I can't go there. I grew up on wordprocessing in the DOS days. Like most others, I've learned to use (or suffered with, depending on how you look at it) various iterations of Word, etc. over the years, both at home and at work. I type close to 100 wpm and am familiar with most desktop publishing applications. That said, the conclusion I've come to is that for almost everything but page layout or final authoring, a fast and intuitive text editor beats everything else hands down. Even in a large corporate environments, I've rarely seen an occasion where the 80/20 rule (80% of your time is spent dicking around getting it "look right" while only 20% is spent typing) didn't apply.
;-)
My point, I guess, if there is one, is that if you learn to use vi, you'll never need to look back. Or want to. You may even come to the same conclusion that I have that wordprocessors are overused and overrated. For everyone else, Joe's Own Editor might be the ticket.
For anyone who is interested in learning vi, but still hasn't gotten far up the learning curve, there is a version called Cream that may be worth looking at. Anyone who has used UltraEdit would recognise it as a vi/UEdit hybrid. My own opinion of the Cream version is that while it's excellent for vi newbies (and a drop-in replacement for UEdit), it burdens itself with the point-and-clickety aspects of of most Windows editors/programs (which is why we're all using vi in the first place). The developer's opinion (which may differ from my own) is as follows:
*** Cream (for Vim) Version 0.29 Released ***
The Cream (for Vim) project (http://cream.sourceforge.net) has
released the latest version of an easy-to-use configuration for Vim.
Cream configures the famous Vim text editor so that it is simple to
use for those of us familiar with Apple or Windows platform software.
Through intuitive menus, keyboard shortcuts, and extensive editing
functions, Cream makes Vim approachable for new users and adds
powerful features for experienced users on both Windows and Linux.
Thats my memmpry as well. I used Turbo Pascal as late as 2000 to convert a program over. I think all of the dos based ide's were wordstar in their behavior. However, version 5.5 and below were really aweful. Version 7 was by far the best as it had windows and you could have more than one file open.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
As I said earlier, vi works like I think. I think "replace this word with that one;" "delete this line;" "yank this paragraph and put it down there;" "move there and insert a word;"
A lot of these feature are in joe. Want to remove a word? ^O. A line? ^Y. Move a paragraph? Highlight the paragraph with ^KB for the beginning and ^KK for the end. Once you have it mightlighted you can ^KC (copy), ^KM (move), ^KY (delete), etc.
You can run vim (or vii as I like to call it) on unix, windows, mac, OS/2, VMS and a heck of a lot of others. Vim will also let you look at stuff that is hard to get at under windows.
Now more than ever vi can run everywhere.
Joe (the Joe in JOE) was my college roomate. He'd stumble in in the middle of the night to rave about this or that optimization, and how he'd figured out the perfect way to do such-and-such.
Technically, the one thing Joe kicked most other editors asses at (except perhaps vi) was its ability to provide a user-friendly text editor environment over slow connections. Joe paid a lot of attention to optimizing the screen redraws to ensure that the minimum number of characters were sent over the pipe. Back in the days of 1200 baud modems and painfully slow cross-country telnet sessions, this made a big difference.
It's funny how JOE (the editor) keeps turning up... I hacked my TiVo recently following all of those instructions on the Internet, and was amused to see that the editor of choice for TiVo hackers is... Joe!
Later today I'll be installing Gentoo on what is going to be my home theater box. The first program I'll emerge? Joe. Simple as that.
I always customize my environments...that is the POWER of Unix...Unix is about *tools* and building your own tool set to allow you to work in the most efficient manner.
By saying that you learned VI because it was everyware means that you are allowing the computer to tell you what to do, not vice versa. That leads to maddness!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Actually, I have joe on my Indy and it works just great! It even works on a Personal Iris with a 36MHz R3000...
It doesnt take hardly any time at all to install JOE if it doesnt already exist.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That I heard lotsa times. I have seen people editing with vi, and it even looks painful!!
I know that maybe you type less keystrokes or something, but in human-computer interaction, it's not the most important measure. What could help you much more is if you didn't have to think about your editing. I can see that vi has shorter replace commands, but the problem is that you have to stop your editing to issue them, and on Joe, or any other not-so-modal editor, you don't, and that means speed. I, for one, use Joe just because I like it, and don't like Emacs keystrokes, and half of my day I edit config files and SQL queries on Joe.
I don't think that "it's a steep curve, but once you learn it it's powerful" statement is true, I have coworkers who use vi from as long as I have been using Linux, and it's painful to watch them do it. Maybe if you are fast you will be fast, even with vi, but that talks good about your speed, and wpm, but not about vi.
My first text editor in UNIX was vi. I hated it's arcane commands, but saw it's usefulness if I was actually on the 300 baud connection it was designed for. I was then introduced to pico. I used pico for a few years, and it's just about as simple of a text editor as you would want. The commands are fairly easy, but sometimes I needed to go to the help screens, and hated navigating through them to fine some of the stranger options I wanted. I was also frustrated by the lack of advanced features that I knew from vi, like command line pipes and such.
I don't recall from where, but a few years later in 1997, I found joe. As a former pico and vi user, I really liked joe. It allowed you to show all the shortcuts on the top of the screen while you were editing documents, so it was easier to learn than pico, and it allowed many of the advanced functions of vi.
For instance, command line pipes are probably my most used joe feature that wasn't available in pico (maybe someone snuck it in recently). You can select a bunch of text, and hit Ctrl-K/. You are then prompted for a command line that all this text will be sent through. Your command line can be as easy as "sort", and all of your lines that you are selected, or as complex as a command-line perl script. For me, the most common are sort, uniq, cut, and perl.
On top of that, joe felt natural. From 1987 to 1996 I used Wordstar throughout all of my school reports. I knew all of the key combinations by heart.
I get weird looks from other senior UNIX admins still when they ask "vi or emacs?", and I answer "joe". I've been doing UNIX admin work now for 8 years, and still hate vi to this very day. I know enough to get a machine repaired enough to install joe, however. joe, screen, and zsh are the first 3 things to get installed on any machine I administer: from Linux, to Solaris, to IRIX to FreeBSD. When I teach new people UNIX, I teach them with joe, not vi. If I ever meet Joseph Allen, I'll be sure to buy him a drink!
Would be nice to have it compile for DOS without cgywin.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It reminds me of muscle car revving gear heads in high school and there very intelligent Ford vs Chevy debates.
Fords Suck
Chevy Blows
Ford Sucks
Your Chevy can eat my dust
Oh yea?
Yea!
...kids go toe to toe and thump each other in chest...scuffle begins...kid with 1973 Datsun with 247,352 miles on it shakes head and walks away.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I am from Uruguay, you insensitive clod!
(where we speak Spanish, which is not at all like English)
Uh, not the way I think. Not the way most people think. Most people, especially those new to the UNIX platform, have no clue. Does alert you to the help facilities on starting up? Does Vim just let you start typing?
Mnemonics are sweet and all, but they are useless unless you already know the command and you are trying to remember it. Joe was really one of the first editors that made it easy for newbies to get help straight off the bat.
You're talking out of your ass here. Have you tried running joe on a slow platform? I have... 16 Mhz 68000 UNIX systems, under a 80186 (yes, "1", that's not a typo) at 10Mhz under DOS. What's more I've used it over 1200 baud modems, raw telnet connections across the country back when you were lucky to have a 56k baud line shared with an entire campus. It worked perfectly. I'm not saying that Vim can't do that as well, but you obviously have no clue when it comes to Joe's system requirements. Maybe you're thinking it's some offshoot of EMACS?
Well, be thankful they didn't use ctrl-alt-delete for anything else than an emergency reset.
Oh, wait... never mind.
Very few people in this world read Slashdot using lynx (or links or w3). Most people have a pretty decent machine (enough to start Mozilla) and use it. Unless you're still in the early 80s why on earth you want to switch between INSERT and COMMAND modes. Use a modeless (one true) editor - use Emacs.
I have a Celeron 466 with 128M and Emacs is fast enough and usable!!
BTW were you posting this comment from a PC/286?! Its time to upgrade your H/W.
This is great news. I have been using joe very happily since 1992, although I use Emacs for programming work generally. Joe is fast like VI and suprisingly powerful.
How many others have been quietly using Joe all these years?
My bicyles
How is one arbitrary command-string more "intuitive" than another?
Have you ever heard of gdm? You can use the mouse to copy/append/paste in a text terminal as well. Also, using a text editor in a terminal gives you the same.
Well of course not... I'm in front of an Amber QUME 103.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Here are my qualifications: I've been using UNIX for 32 years, starting with ed, the original line editor. No screen editors then because we didn't have screens. They didn't show up until around 1975. Soon after Bell Labs employees who went to Berkeley started bringing vi back with them.
Anyway, now for my opinions:
1. One must distinguish between the learnability of an editor and its usability. (True of any user interface, in fact.) For UNIX character-oriented screen editors, there is a huge difference between the two. For other user interfaces the difference is not so great, but it is in this case. Go to a beginner learning vi and you will find that the modes are confusing. Go to an experienced vi user, and you will find that he or she is barely aware of the modes.
2. I edit UNIX files a lot, but in two very different ways: The first is occasional use, right at the console, when I'm unfamiliar with the system or just setting it up. In this case the last thing I want to do is install an editor. I would be happy to use ed; I just want something quick to, for example, set up an fstab file. The second kind of use is for everyday editing, and for that I'm willing to take the time to install what I want. Actually, though, because I have so many different machines, I don't bother. As soon as the system is able to, I go to my primary machine and access the new machine via SSH or Xterm.
I used to think, as many others here do, that vi was the essential editor to learn because it is always there. Imagine my surprise when I installed gentoo the other day and found no vi! Something I'd never heard of, nano, was there instead. OK, fine, Control-o to write the file. At least it was listed at the bottom of the screen. Soon I "emerged" vi (vim, really), and the Gentoo system was back in the fold.
For everyday use, I never use a character editor anyway. I did once, but stopped around 10 or 12 years ago. (Guys, I'm way older than most of you, but even I know that it's 2004!) So for me (given my description of the roles editors play, above) joe has no use whatsoever. In fact, it solves a problem that I don't actually have.
Nonetheless, I wish the new joe project all the best. WordStar (which I used a bit in the mid-1980s) was a great piece of work, and it's nice to see it live on.
Give this guy your mod points, he deserves it.
Actually, I'll take emacs over death. Not sure about vi though!
(I recognise the power of vi however, but I'd have to take the damned vitutorial 10 times before I remembered all the shortcuts. That, or make a note of them on paper. Emacs can be configured nicely, but is way to complex for what most people use it for.)
Why do I like pico/nano? Because for most tasks it is ideal and works as expected and simply. I'm sure that Joe will be good for many people as well.
And for editors in X? As long as they give me the option to change the font to fixed-7x13 I'm happy. Although kate is a pretty good editor, and it has a couple of nice features that make me use it for certain work related tasks - namely order processing (use integrated terminal to run GPG to decrypt GPG encrypted customer payments, it is mainly the reduced window clutter and all-in-one functionality that make me use it).
Even within X, i still use joe.. its fast, and i never had to re-learn my control codes from back when i was using wordstar in the 80's.
If i install a server, its the first thing i add..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Check SIMTEL's archives. Ages and ages ago there was a version of Joe for DOS, but Joe gave up on it since it was a pain in the ass to develop for DOS with all that 64K memory segment crap.
Anyhow, a quick Google turned up this file. It's version 2.2, which doesn't have up-to-date features, but it runs.
There was a thread months back about getting a package picked up by the major Linux distro's. The funniest response said "Write a text editor, man -- there just aren't enough text editors in Linux".
After 300 odd posts, the only point worth saving that I've thus far seen is that Joe is friendly to people who still think in terms of some program they used in the eighties.
So how about somebody writes the kind of editor we need NOW?
The biggest challenge over the past few years has been editing *ML text on servers via browsers, and making it BOTH XHTML (or some subset thereof) and user-friendly. I've seen 20-odd attempts to do something *like* this, but nothing that actually puts the two together.
IMHO then, the #1 most helpful thing that could be written at the moment is a browser-mod for Mozilla that would allow a web form to attach a DTD (and a stylesheet) to a TextArea, which the browser would then respect by firing up an XML editor that followed the given XML definition. Xopus could be a good model for how this might work.
I won't say there hasn't been progress -- I'm writing and spellchecking this HTML in gVim via Mozex at this moment. We're getting there! But the DTD linking can only really occur in the browser.
(Write it myself, I hear you say? I don't have 3 months free to get my C up to speed. Anyone want to code this in exchange for a website?) :D
True. But when you need to input surrogate pairs you can use a tool like Unipad, which gives you a virtual keyboard. (windows only, sorry).
Chip H.
.. you need to edit the network configuration files before you can use the Internet. Sorry, bud, no ftp/http/wget/lynx/mozilla, nothing, before your gateway and TCP/IP settings are configured.
This happened to me the other day when setting up a Linux system, I had to use vi to edit the text files for setting up networking on a Linux installation.
Now this is not a problem for me because I can already use vi. But if I was one of the millions of Windows users who just wanted to try out Linux, you can bet I'd have just hit a huge wall here, and gone right back to Windows.
And we wonder why people aren't flocking to Linux in droves. Don't we want more people to adopt Linux?
We have to stop expecting that all users must know vi before they can make a Linux system useful. A text editor does not inherently need to be difficult to use, and computers should help humans as far as they can. So why not just start including an alternative, friendly text editor in addition to vi as a new standard 'included in every distro', so that newcomers to Linux at least have a slightlier easier option. Requiring end-users (note I mean desktop users) to be able to know vi in order to get anywhere in Linux is a joke in 'this day and age'.
Perhaps, but I wasn't talking about operating systems. I was talking about text editors. Which I feel is a totally different class of problem/difficulty. Why do I need a manual to do the simplest and most basic things in a text editor? Seriously.
As for that "it's a steep learninig curve, but once you learn it it's powerful" statement people like to bring up, things like Joe are powerful because they do not have a steep learning curve. What exactly is it that vi's steep learning curve gives people apart from a feeling of "eliteness", that can't be found elsewhere in easier to use software? What's the pay-off?
[...] groking vi is valuable as it is ubiquitous
How come that is the only argument I hear from people about why vi is so great? "It's everywhere". So is windows. So what.
--
Simon
Oh, fscking, please... Now I could understand this kind of bullcrap for administrating some heterogenous mix of servers. But for programming?
1. Tell you what. I'll take a proper IDE instead. Because programming isn't about typing. Replacing text that's already there is good and fine, but showing me the methods/parameters/source/javadocs for some obscure module that someone else wrote, now that's what makes or breaks maintenance and debugging. Yes, I could string endless pipelines of grep, sed, and whatever else, to get to that text. But I'd rather leave those menial tasks to the computer, and use my mind for the thing I'm actually paid for: programming.
2. Do I use _all_ features in that IDE? No. Do I use enough of them to make me more productive than the nostalgic monkeys who still do all that via the command line? You bet.
Do I remember _all_ commands and their shortcuts? No, of course not. Do I know where to find them in the menus when I do need them? Yep. That's the good part about having a good GUI: discoverability.
Well, that's good enough for me, then.
3. CPU-wise, I don't give a flying fsck. The age of the PC/286 was a decade ago. Now any workstation (yes, even the crap underpowered ones from Sun) has enough horsepower to run a proper IDE. In fact, to run a dozen of them at the same time, without missing a beat.
Briefly: I don't have to stick to an outdated POS whose only reason to exist was that it runs on a text-only terminal with a 300 baud modem. Get over it already.
4. For that matter, I don't give a flying fsck about the "it's installed on all machines" either. I don't want to program on all machines. I'll jolly well sit at my workstation and use something comfortable instead.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio -- TV host Sean Hannity was found dead in his hotel room last night after a book signing. The coroner has not yet officially ruled it a suicide, but apparently that's what it's going to be ruled.
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will mourn his passing -- even if you didn't agree with him, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Question, does vi or emacs have Unicode support?
Vim will also let you look at stuff that is hard to get at under windows. Can I get a hell yeah!!! While a few registry tweaks can allow you to right click on any file and open it up in whatever your favorite text/hex editor is, VIM gives you that right out of the box. GVIM on windows installs easily, has a very nice default setup, and is quite felxible. Vim.org also gives you plenty of extensions, support, and a forum. The OSX version of VIM ain't too shabby either. I'm using the first panther compatiable Coccoa build of vim 6.2 on my iBook. I wish that dragging a document on the doc icon when it was alreay open started a new vim window, but its only a matter of time befroe they work out the kinks. If I need to do "real" devopment on OSX, I jsut start up X11 and use the fink version of GVIM.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
If being installed everywhere is a must, then you should use ed, that way you could use your editor, even if your only way to read output is a line printer, or maybe cat > file.txt, that is everywhere too ;)
I'm a sysadmin and can use vi fairly well if I don't have joe available, just because I feel more confortable at it, and I don't think that is a problem, but I like to install bash, joe, less, top, lsof and several things, not because it can't be done on a clean install, but why not use some extra tools?.
For me the advantage of joe over all the other editors is that it has a *very easy* learning curve, and I can introduce new ppl to Unix text editing in a few minutes, also time is not wasted because is joe is a lightweight and very powerful editor if you go deep into it, a lot of the combos are useful in the prompt of several shells because they are similar to emacs.
Have you ever tried to guide through telephone a guy who hasn't have a clue of unix through editing a conf file with vi? I have been through that some times, and joe served its purpose nicely.
Can't understand all this banging is all about choices.
You know speaking of editors what I really want is something capable of column editing. Under windows I found ultraedit but nothing with linux. Makes me wish for ISPF again.
Mandrake 7.0 had vi, but that thing is a horrid joke no matter what anyone says (I'll be flamed for this). I found JOE a lot easier to use, and it was possible to discover what was going on in the program, as opposed to having to look up how to quit vi on the net somewhere. I actually started using JOE because it shares the same name as me ;).
I can't spell ripburger
FTE also has menus. But the project seems dead...
"What could help you much more is if you didn't have to think about your editing"
That's a dumb argument. It's just a case of getting used to the program. You no more have to think about your editing than any other text editor once you get used to it. And of course if you grew up with vi, then you would have to get used to using a non-vi editor. Editing with a none vi editor is just as difficult for me as it is for you to use vi.
I hate it when people think that their way is inherently superior to everyone elses for no reason other than that it is their's. It's like Windows, I can't use it. To me it's difficult. Consequently, I find that Gnome and KDE are difficult to use. On the other hand, I don't have a problem with bash, the ksh or whatever.
It's just what you know and feel comfortable with. If I never hear another person complaining about UNIX usability I will have achieved nirvana I think.
John Nash had no trouble believing in almost anything.
> People who come from Windows don't want to use an editor at all. And if they need to anyway, then I don't think joe will disappoint them.
Actually, I came across from the Dark Side(TM) and I actually do find editors quite handy at times, for, well, editing things! I like XEmacs myself, but can handle VI(M) if I must.
Perhaps you should think a bit more next time you are about to generalize about ex-Windows folk, they might not be as stupid as they seem.
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
So very brill they are Is there any site that list of the best stuff for consoles?
And TWM with X-apps.. It is so amazingly "retro" - brilliant stuff!
Would love to d/l more. Yeah - that's right: URPMI - Got a Problem With That???
So it is a great way to 'move up the ladder' of editor functionality/productivity.
Incidentally, the first unix editor I used was 'ed'. For those arguing for an editor to be used on every system, it should be the ancient 'ed' which is even a part of the rescue shells like sash(this is what you use when glibc gets messed up somehow or you messed up ld.so.conf and none of your dynamically linked binaries work, ;).
VI doesn't have modes, damn it! VI has commands, period. It so happens that some commands have arguments, one of the possible arguments is text to be inserted into the file. There is no "insert mode" and "command mode". If you learn VI keeping this fact firmly in mind, you'll have no problems. If you try to keep track of "insert mode" vs. "command mode" you'll get lost faster than you can say "dt,f)P".
People get so hung up about VI's "modes" they miss its true brilliance - its orthogonal command structure: a VI command is usually a combination of (1) character(s) indicating which action to take followed by (2) character(s) indicating what area of the file is affected. For example, if 'w' moves the cursor one word, and '$' moves it to the end of the line, then you can combine them with the 'd' (delete) action to obtain 'dw' - delete word and 'd$' - delete to the end of the line.
When you insert text, you type something like "aText", reading "add-to-right-of-cursor" "Text" "done". "Text" is just an argument to the "add" command (there are various other commands that also insert text into the file). There is no "insert mode", there's just "writing the argument to an insertion command".
This is much more intuitive than remembering that control-W or alt-E deletes a word and control-T or alt-Q deletes to the end of the line. It is also much, much more powerful, since at the price of N+M commands you get all N*M combinations. No other editor comes even close. I'll bet most non-VI users don't know whether their editor even has a command to delete to the end of the line, and even less what the command is if there is one. No to mention useful things like "cut everything between this parenthesis" ("d%"), or "copy the next function argument" ("yt,").
*That* is what VI is all about. It is also why so many editors can be made to emulate each other's keystrokes, but they can't emulate VI.
I have had friends learning VI, and once this simple notion "clicked" they became proficient very quickly. Watching people learn VI is rather fun... first, make sure they understand the above. Then, and only then, let them work through the tutorial, and in general use VI for all their editing work.
For the first few days, they'll tend to throw a chair at you if you ask them how well things are going. Don't worry, that's a normal response. Most people drop off at this stage, but since your vic... - sorry, friend - knows why he's going through this, he'll pull through.
Within a week you'll see the "click" happening. It is easy to verify; at this point, be prepared to duck another chair if you dare suggest to the new VI convert that he give it up for the "intuitive" editor he's been using before. The real fun part is having plenty of witnesses to both the "before" and "after" reactions.
Now, if someone decides, for some mysterious reason, the universe needs yet another editor, at least do it *right*! The "perfect" editor would use the VI way of constructing commands, but all commands would start with control-X or alt-X, so that normal ASCII characters would be just inserted. My biggest disappointment with Emacs is that it doesn't work this way. I'm certain it is possible to write an Emacs mode that _does_ work this way, but nobody did (except, of course, VIPER - which makes Emacs emulate VI).
I have been using VI ever since its first version came out for UNIX version 7, and AFAIK, in all this time, *nobody* has *ever* came up with another editor that uses VI-like combined operator/operand commands. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. I suspect a lot of it is due to people getting so hung up about VI having "modes" and therefore being so "bad" there's nothing good to learn from it. Well, their loss!
Well, I (and many others) will hang on to our out-"moded" editor. VI addiction is so strong that I have personally ported VI to VMS to satisfy it. Today we have VIM running on every imaginable platform, so getting our fix is easier than ever.
I *am* sitting at a WYSE terminal, you insensitive clod! And reading /. with links web browser. Comfortable, modern xterminals are in next room, but it is too crowded. Right here I'm the only terminal junkie. :)
all I need in an editor is a talking paperclip!
Not really, however, the top status bar in joe says:Which if you hit opens up a help window, which tells you the various basic commands, along with how to scroll to help window to find even more nifty commands and features. Failing that, if you simply cant figure it out, ctrl+c will do the right thing and exit - unlike vi.
NB: ctrl+k d is not exit, it's save file (ie ':w' in vi). ctrl+c is exit (':q!' in vi), ctrl-k x is save+exit (':wq' in vim).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Can anyone tell me why vi and emacs (maybe joe is different) can't do soft line wrapping?
Even Windows Notepad can do it. Even this Mozilla text box in which I'm typing does it.
Does it violate some long-forgotten principle of Unix design?
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
You know, I completely agree with you. I learned how to program, first in BASIC, then in TurboPascal and C. But I did most of my programming in TurboPascal, and like you say, the interface was just an extension of our fingers. You got used to the short cuts and the syntax coloring was awesome. What's more, it reminds you of the drop into a DOS prompt to run your program. Oh, if only programming were still that simple...of course it wouldn't be as fun as it is now! :P
ESC is not really part of the command. It is part of the preceding insert. And you could just ZZ, which seems pretty simple.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
/Does [vim] alert you to the help facilities on starting up?/
:help iccf<Enter> for information :q<Enter> to exit :help<Enter> or <F1> for on-line help :help version6<Enter> for version info
~ VIM - Vi IMproved
~
~ version 6.2
~ by Bram Moolenaar et al.
~ Vim is open source and freely distributable
~
~ Help poor children in Uganda!
~ type
~
~ type
~ type
~ type
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
...enjoyed by us console freaks who still miss the old DOS days, and cannot finish understanding vi's modes...
Vi has only three modes: command, input, and last line. Command mode is for navigation and entering input and last line modes, input mode is for input, and last line mode is for file operations, ed commands, and searching.
Okay, everyone, let's count...1...2...uh...uh...what comes after 2? No wonder the 'D' in DOS stands for "dumb."
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Techincally, :!man vi is onscreen help. Not well organized, or user-friendly. But you can get onscreen help from vi.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
With the exception of jumping to the beginning or the end of functions, vi can do all those things. I'm sure vim has the function jumping thing, too. Anyway, I use some of these more in vi than I do in emacs so it's kind of funny that you mention emacs having these features that you see as being useless. They're more useful in vi than they are in emacs because the editing style of vi supports them better. For the record though, I prefer emacs.
The fact that emacs has more features than I'll ever use doesn't bother me. There are some crazy things about it that I love. I can use it as a mail reader or as a news reader and I stay in the same environment so the keystrokes are more consistent. It's not fair to compare emacs to vi. It's not fair to either emacs or vi. Emacs is more cumbersome, true, but it's more of development environment than an editor. When you use emacs with gdb and make, it can sure save you a lot of work. Vi is a wonderfully efficient editor. If you're a good typist (which I am not), vi allows a user to just blaze through editing tasks.
Nope it is because you can look up at the right hand corner and see CTRL-k-h brings up help and then you can read the menu.
You want to make vi/vim 100 times more user friendly? Have an option to bring up a menu of common commands and stick it right on the main screen.
There are two things that every editor should allow you to do without RTFM. Exit and save the file. I am glad you and so many other people love vi. But it is not user friendly in any way shape or form.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
But vi is so much faster! Put you CTRL key between TAB and LShift, as God intended, and ESC is as quick as CTRL-[ ! A simple '' gets you back to where you started your search from! Set a bookmark with ma, and get to it with 'a ! MIRACULOUS! As for vi clones, vim sucks (If I wanted Emacs, I'd use Emacs). The 1T vi clone is Elvis.
I use joe for 9 years already. /usr/ports/editors/joe; make install
And know what I do when getting on new systems:
apt-get install joe
or cd
Period.
I can edit in vi with no problem. But still I prefer joe. It's my friend.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Having worked for companies that preferred both emacs and vi, I've learned both reasonably well.
The best editor is the one that meets your needs. I consider all of these as terminal editors, good for quick and dirty edits of small scripts or config files. I'm personally partial to vi, and use it frequently for such tasks.
The best GUI editor I've ever found is JEdit. It's fat, written in Java (not universially installed by any means), and likes to take up screen real estate. But it has so many features to make text-editing painless! My goodness, it's like the good-parts of every other text editor I've ever worked with, and it's got syntax higlighting etc. for every language I've ever heard of. No offense to the GUI versions of VI and emacs, but they've been roundly beaten.
Personally, if I'm going to get serious about editing code, it's almost always better to either transfer the files to my local box or install JEdit on the remote system. I lose a little time in setup, but I can work much more quickly and efficiently.
Naturally, if all I want to do is add a hosts entry or change a firewall rule, I'll use a console editor. Big job = big tool, little job=little tool. It's a simple concept.
While it may be true that to a man with a hammer, all problems resemble nails, at least we can employ a variety of hammers!
That makes Vim more user friendly than vi (but then, a pointy stick jabbed into your eye is more user friendly than vi). One nice thing about Joe is that the help reminder remains on screen all of the time. The help window also shares the screen with the edit window, so you don't need to bounce back and forth between the help and the text you are editing.
Nano is probably the best choice these days for real naive users, since the basic help (how to save a file, how to exit the editor, etc) appears onscreen by default.
Letting users know how to get out of the editor can be really important. On my college's mainframe, just after we switched to UNIX in the late 80's, we had problems with the system bogging down. It turns out people couldn't figure out how to exit EMACS, so they would hit ^Z to get back to a prompt when they were finished editing. Well, after a few hours of CS students doing edit-compile cycles, the system would run out of virtual memory due to the hundreds of suspended EMACS jobs...
...and cannot finish understanding vi's modes...
Why do vi folks always think "if you don't like vi it's because you don't understand vi"? Maybe we prefer a different editor simply because we do. To me, vi seems like a relic of the 80s - a powerful relic, to be sure; but still it's a relic.
On a related note, I don't use "mail" from the command line anymore either...
#DeleteChrome
" Techincally, :!man vi is onscreen help. Not well organized, or user-friendly. But you can get onscreen help from vi."
Let's see. You have to know what the !man command does to bring up help. It is not well organized or user-friendly... You call that help???
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No crap! That happened to me when I was remotely logged onto a server and tried to use the cvs commit command without the -m flag. (Disclaimer: I'm a Mac user, so I have no clue how to do much in Unix other than CVS.) Suddenly the screen blanked with a little line across the bottom and a blinking cursor at the top and I'm supposed to know what the hell to do? It wasn't until I was talking with a bud later on that I figured out I was even in a text editor. At the very least, can't they spare a line at the top of the screen for "VI Text Editor version X" or something? After trying every key combination I could think of I ended up just closing the terminal window and cutting off the connection.
When people say that open source software has terrible, terrible UIs it's not just talking about the graphical stuff. It's usually worth it to be to hook up FTP, download the file, edit it with my old copy of the Codewarrior IDE, then re-upload. I could have done that process twice in the time it would have taken me to figure out how to type a line of text and save it in VI.
Comment of the year
You're referring to Midnight Commander.
Just use NEdit. I has syntax highlighting for almost any language. Extremely easy to use. Power search and replace functionality. You just can't find a better text editor, especially for writing code and scripts.
# Speed: CPU-wise, vim is still by far more efficient than joe.
Try running joe on an SGI Indy! Or on a PC/286!
Have you ever used joe? Because I use joe all the time and the time comparison between vim and joe is astronomical. Unless you have
ln -s vi vim
AND vi is an ancient version back when you had your PC/286, in which case you should compare the earliest versions of joe (which were a lot smaller also)
Don't post comments that you obviously have not tested or are not a test at all
(my tweaked out linux 2.2 kernel runs a LOT faster on my 486 than the cvs linux 2.6 configured with everything under the sun)
Schmuck
Oh sure, JOE gets on the front page of Slashdot. How about JED? It's like the missing editor that Emacs never had. It's also got built-in S-Lang scripting, has built-in syntax highlighting, session recovery, drop-down menus, and has been ported to many platforms.
I guess if we're going to whore our favorites, go here to learn more about JED.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
I never learned Joe, but I may give it a try (can we say "apt-get install joe"?). My reasoning behind learning VI (and VIM) was that VI was the only editor on the HP-9000 system I first started working in Unix on.
I bought Red Hat 5.1 and installed it on a home computer to help me learn VI (and other Unix commands), and it just stuck.
To me, VI is the best choice, because it IS ubiquitous. I didn't have the option of installing Joe or Emacs on the HP, and the administrator wouldn't even hear the argument.
I've been using VI (and VIM) for almost six years now, and I use it on all my platforms, including Windows and Max OS X. To me, VI is very easy to use simply because I did spend a lot of time learning it. And yes, once you learn VI, it is powerful AND easy.
No matter where you go... there you are.
ld: Undefined symbols:
_libiconv
_libiconv_open
I dont see anything on the configure script to supply mac os x's built in libiconv
Any tips?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
(Regarding arrow keys): The reason for this is that vi was invented and was popular before arrow keys were a standard thing on all keyboards.
I'm going to expand on this a little because you missed an important point on why vi behaves as it does. The reason why arrow keys "mess up" documents is that vi is a character mode editor. That is, it reads one character at a time and interprets it as a command as if it was typed.
On the VT-100 series of terminals, the arrow keys map out to: ESC + [ + (A|B|C|D) where A is up, B is down, C is left, and D is right. So when a person is in edit mode in vi and they hit, say, the right arrow, they end the insert (ESC), get a beep for an invalid command ([), then get the remainder of the line hacked off (D). Combine that with the other arrow key sequences and you can get a real mess in a hurry.
The
With joe, copying and moving text works right. The selection is highlighted properly, and you don't have to remember what's inside some invisible cut buffer.
With joe, find/replace is unified. Choose what you want, then you're asked for options like case sensitivity and so on.
WordStar, TurboPascal 4, and TurboPascal 5.5 all work mostly like joe. Even Borland C++ retained the keystrokes in addition to the new CUA ones.
My only wish is that the default keymap stop abusing the backtick key. Oh, they'd better not ruin the fast start-up that joe has.
cat > message.txt
Edit files the natural way!
^D
How would a vi user deal with a MacOS telnet
that doesn't pass the escape key through?
With joe, no problem. I don't need Esc, Alt,
arrow keys, Meta, ^Q, ^S, DEL, or ^H. I've seen
all of these keys missing. With joe, I get by
with ^K and either arrow keys or ^F, ^B, ^P, ^N.
This is always one of the the first commands I enter when I do a new install.
Though, nowdays it is often "fink install joe".
Finally! I can't wait to Ctrl-KB, and to Ctrl-KQ vi, so my pain will Ctrl-KK.
LOL! Laughing ON LINE!!!! Win-DOZE! Did you just make that up? Seriously, that is some good stuff. I didn't even notice at first, its subliminal....then BAM! It hit me...Wiiiin-DOZE. Like its sleeping, or SLOWWWWW, right? Ahhaha, you kill me man! Awesome work! Completely fresh and original. YOU sir, are the future of Slashdot! MOD PARENT UP! +5 FUNNY
(Score:-1, Wrong)
There is no escape in either the :wq or ZZ commands.
:q you don't need the w if you made no changes, or have already saved your changes. Suppose I use vi to browse a file, not intending to edit it. When I exit, I'll use :q, just in case I may have hit a stray x (or worse) while viewing the file -- I wouldn't want to save the unintentional change.
You might have to hit the escape key to exit a previous insert or change command, but you are only adding to confusion if you imply that it is part of the exit command.
Also in
I use JOE almost exclusively. being converted from windows notepad, I find a heavily-modded jpico configuration was easiest for me to pick up.
/etc/apt/sources.list so that I can apt-get install joe :).
The only exception is when I use NEdit to copy a whole document (bigger than the screen) to the clipboard, or vi before I have JOE installed on a new system (usually just to edit
What with (weird, but usable) search & replace regexes, recordable macros, useability in non-X environemnts (I work remotely with machines with broken X forwarding a lot), insane customizability (jpico, jstar, jmacs emulation modes), and the ability to pipe stuff back and forth from the shell, I don't really need anything else, and I didn't need to re-learn a whole lot to move to it.
Besides, with the time I saved by not participating in the vi/emacs wars, I actaully got work done!
GUIs are just bad - when the shit hits the fan
and your GUI doesn't work, your precious xemacs
isn't going to help you ( just by way of example,
as i know it has a text mode )
some knob tried to get me to start using some java
based "programmers editor"
yes, why don't i just go learn dreamweaver while
i'm fooking At it, eh?
Vim definitely has Unicode support. ;-)
I don't know about emacs
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Are you the joe, in JOE?
Wow. I've been using joe since 1994(?), when I first downloaded it for use on OS/2 Warp 3. Needed a good, familiar text editor to replace the QEdit I'd been using under DOS 5/6.
For creative writing (ascii text files, yo), joe can't be beat. Other "programmers' editors" are too cumbersome.
Nowadays it's the preferred text-mode editor on my PowerBook G4. I think the only machine I still use which hasn't had JOE on it is my Amiga.
Congrats and thanks to the author, whom I will assume is named Joe!
CTRL-H is your friend.
ctrl-s is, like 's' for 'saving'
So it's English-biased? What happens when you port it to Spaish or German or Chinese or Korean and those key mnemonics don't make sense anymore? For those people (and there are a lot of them) the keystroke choices are arbitrary.
My other first post is car post.
What exactly is it that vi's steep learning curve gives people apart from a feeling of "eliteness", that can't be found elsewhere in easier to use software? What's the pay-off?
Well, for starters, when you spend a good deal of time editing text files (source, confs, whatever), vi can be marvelous for doing a lot of work with just a few keystrokes. Delete a word, delete a line, delete to this mark, search and replace, yank and paste, all easily done with 2-3 keypresses.
When having to do edits over a console link, every keystroke counts if you're doing a great deal of editing. I learned vi specifically for this reason when performing emergency firewall rule changes or fixes over a 9600 baud serial connection at my last job.
How come that is the only argument I hear from people about why vi is so great?
When you are put in a situation where you have to edit something on a UNIX system that you are unfamilar with, or any Solaris system that's recently been reinstalled, knowing vi makes doing any editing task very easy.
Not everyone is faced with these sorts of situations, and not everyone has a significant need to use/learn vi (note I never said there was a steep learning curve, I picked up on basic skills in less than a day). For the reasons mentioned above, knowing how to use vi was incredibly useful and saved me a good deal of time. Learning it was a minimal investment that had a significant benefit in my case.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
I'm a long-time loyal JOE user. Been one since I loaded up my first Slackware install eight years ago only to discover how much VI and I don't get along - at all.
/. today, if a machine doesn't have it, the very first thing I put on is JOE. Period.
Over the years, I've kept trying to become comfortable with vi, because, as many have pointed out, it's everywhere. However, for me it sucks - it and I don't work the same way. It was clearly built by individuals who didn't think the same way I do. I refuse to change the way I think to fit a tool that I can't even convince myself to like. I'd rather get what I consider to be a better tool. So, I use a tool that I like that's fast, efficient, works like I want it to, and gets the job done. I should also mention that I don't really use X - 99% of my work is done in SSH sessions. So GUI anything is useless in my world. I need a good, solid text-based editor.
In reference to another story on
I'm thrilled to see the new release. I'm glad somebody's working on it again, because I was always too lazy to improve it. As for the complaints I've seen, I couldn't care less about proper Unicode support (as I hate Unicode with a unique passion reserved exclusively for it...), and I'm sure the context highlighting will be improved.
Pretty cool - kudos to those working on keeping my one and only editor running in 2004.
I agree 99%.
there are many, many editors called ted. Are you sure its for DOS? Are you sure it was written by someone called Michael Sweet? Are you sure its primarily a text editor? Is it proprietary, is it freely available? I'd love to go hunting for it on the web if I could have more information.
Vim is not going to have multiple windows in the OS X or any other build. It would require a significant rewrite of the entire editor, according to the docs.
Here's an arbitrary string for ya: s-a-r-c-a-s-m.
--JC
It does have multiple windows in windows. Well, their multiple processes, but you can have multiple editor windows open. I don't know much about programming in OSX, but if you could make an app bundle that started a wrapper program that in turn made calls to the gvim exedcutable embedded in said app bundle, you could have multiple windows probally.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
You might like/ ~check out~/ports/editors/jupp/files/jupprc?rev=HEAD&cont ent-type=text/plain
https://mirbsd.bsdadvocacy.org:8890/cvs.cgi
if you're after the good old DOS days.
As written in the "first 10 things after install"
thread, I'm using it myself.
This j*rc file, called "jupprc" as a pun on a friend's
name (a joke only Germans from a specific region may
understand, that's why I won't go out on it), is
loosely based upon the jstarrc file, in that it
mimics the WordStar combos quite well.
Additionally, it's got an easy way to insert Meta
or any ASCII value, some better defaults (who in
the world needs backup files? man cvs) and the
title bar displays the current file position, row
and column as well as offset, and the ASCII code
of the char under the cursor, in decimal and hex.
It's most tested under joe-2.8 which I still prefer,
but has been fully working under a 2.9-pre version;
I think it should work with joe-3.0, but there might
be problems with UTF-8 because the codes are longer.
(Help is still on ^J)
Feedback for this file goes to
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
-MDL
Happy meals fund terrorism
Vim is not "upwards" compatible with vi. Watch a dedicated vim user try to use nvi. Laugh. A lot.
/usr/bin/joe /usr/bin/joe* /usr/bin/vim /usr/bin/vim*
Myself, I learned "ed" and then picked up vi and vim from that. Seriously. The "ed" skills _do_ translate directly to "vi" and "vim".
"vi" works like _you think_. It doesn't work the way I think. I don't plan out my edits ahead of time. It's an organic process for me.
As for emacs features, You've never seen anyone use those!!?! Seriously? Function tags are a godsend when working in a large, foreign code base. Though personally I can only use them with GUI emacs 'cause I can't remeber the M-x commands for them.
As for performance, Joe uses far FEWER system resources then vim.
$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 171068 Aug 15 2003
$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1010840 Apr 1 18:51
Oh, I'm very sorry, I did misunderstand you! I must apologize for my my rudeness, especially that last bit. I didn't mean to snap, I think it may have been early in the morning or something :0)
I think I know the people who you were talking about! I have to use windows sometimes, mostly for games, so I use Emacs for windows or another neat editor called crimson editor , which provides syntax highlighting, tabbed interface and other nice things.
Sorry again for the misunderstanding!
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather