
JOE – Joe's own editor 4.5 released - jhallenworld
https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/NEWS.md
======
colanderman
I've used JOE for 15 years. I recently upgraded form JOE 3.x to 4.4 and was
unimpressed with the recent decline in quality to the point of considering
switching editors. Hopping between open/close braces with ^G no longer counts
nested pairs correctly; TAB now randomly inserts 2 or 3 spaces instead of the
2 I have it configured for and that my files use; and my home-key settings in
my config file are ignored.

I'm completely baffled how the developers can add such bugs to a stable,
decades-old product. Regardless of whether the bugs get fixed, it's shaken my
confidence that I can trust JOE not to screw up my work. (Even 3.x JOE gets
into screwed-up states and crashes from time to time; I trust 4.x JOE even
less. Even the "save often" mantra I'm cautious about, since I don't want to
save data from a screwed-up state. That's worse than straight-up crashing.)

~~~
jhallenworld
I'm not sure what you are seeing- it's possible the config file syntax has
evolved. Anyway, if you find issues, please submit bug reports for them:

[https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-
editor/bugs/?source=navbar](https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-
editor/bugs/?source=navbar)

This is the best way to influence the development direction and we certainly
do fix issues.

~~~
colanderman
Yes, it looks like both the joerc and the ftyperc formats have changed in a
non-backward-compatible way. At least, wiping those fixed the ^G issue for me.
(I can't tell yet about the indent issue since I can't reproduce that
reliably; if it persists I will file a bug report.)

Thanks for all your work developing and maintaining JOE. My apologies for such
a negative earlier post; I would not get so easily frustrated if I did not
rely on JOE every day :)

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placebo
I found JOE while looking for a free cross-platform, preferably open source
editor that could handle huge files with ease - you know, file sizes that make
most editors choke and die (or make your system freeze while trying to
allocate an insane amount of memory). Even vim isn't especially effective
handling very large files. JOE was the first (and for the time being, the
only) free cross-platform editor I found that handles the largest of files
easily.

Found it here (noticed this link was submitted to HN in the past):

[https://github.com/jhallen/joes-
sandbox/blob/master/editor-p...](https://github.com/jhallen/joes-
sandbox/blob/master/editor-perf/readme.md)

------
hsnewman
I've been using joe for over 25 years, I just like how easy it is to use.

~~~
mschuster91
For me, over a decade. It's simply easy and does not pull any confusing tricks
like nano with long lines, or vi with... incomprehensible behavior.

~~~
danellis
My one use for vi is to edit /etc/joe/joerc to enable -nobackups.

~~~
fpoling
That was one of the reasons I gave up on using Joe for system administration.
It showed rather big mismatch between my mental model of how a system editor
should work and what Joe did.

~~~
jhallenworld
We will continue to debate making nobackups the default, but what other
behavior is wrong for system administration?

~~~
fpoling
Scrolling, not wrapping, of lines that do not fit screen.

~~~
Spivak
I would argue that scrolling is the sanest default for systems administration
since text files are usually formatted to a fixed width and are sensitive to
line breaks.

~~~
fpoling
Yet try to edit with horizontal scrolling XML or JSON file written without
line-breaks. Or perhaps some other config files written on assumption that a
terminal window will always be maximized and get at least 200 character width.

In my opinion an editor for system administration should try to show as much
information as possible by default and horizontal scrolling is an opposite of
that.

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barrkel
jmacs is my go-to lightweight emacs - not as light as mg, but comes with
syntax highlighting and keyboard macros.

The hex editor is reasonably nifty too.

~~~
gnuvince
mg also has keyboard macros, but it doesn't have UTF-8 support yet, which is
the reason why I prefer to use jmacs for quick edits.

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emmanueloga_
Who's Joe? Is he still around? There's a bit of history about the editor here
but not too much about Joe himself (well, he appears to have children and own
a house these days :-) [1]).

1: [https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-
editor/mercurial/ci/default/tr...](https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-
editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/docs/history.md)

~~~
theonemind
I think he's replied to a few comments here as "jhallenworld"\--so guessing
he's around!

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alexnewman
I wont use software on sourceforge. period.

~~~
skrebbel
Why? Question mark.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'd guess because of their bundling of relative malware (sometimes against
devs knowledge).

[https://www.howtogeek.com/218764/warning-
don%E2%80%99t-downl...](https://www.howtogeek.com/218764/warning-
don%E2%80%99t-download-software-from-sourceforge-if-you-can-help-it/)

Supposedly it's better now??

~~~
skrebbel
They haven't done that for a long time now, ever since they changed owner. The
site is ugly and old fashioned, and a little spammy with the ads at times, but
that's it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If you invite me to a dinner party and I shit on the table it doesn't really
matter how much I claim I'm reformed you're not going to invite me back unless
you're really short on company. If there's any other source then there's no
reason one would spend time checking out if sourceforge is really reformed or
they just did a legal manoeuvre and started hiding the malware better.

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codazoda
Wait. People still use sourceforge? I thought it was a wasteland of old
projects that had crapware attached to all their downloads.

~~~
detaro
Sourceforge doesn't belong to the company that did the crapware thing anymore,
and the new(-ish by now) owners stopped doing that.

EDIT: relevant announcement from January 2016:
[https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-
fut...](https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future-
plans/)

~~~
moe
They should just shut it down.

It's hard to think of a domain name with a worse reputation in tech circles.

~~~
tome
It's got an excellent reputation with open source fans who were around at the
turn of the century.

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pluma
That describes me and I didn't follow its course after the crapware thing so
it had a terrible reputation with me until I just learned about the
acquisition in this thread. I wouldn't be so sure.

