

Joe's Own Editor 4.0 Released - jhallenworld
https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/NEWS.md

======
bri3d
My parents gave me a copy of Slackware Linux when I was a kid and it has
shaped my editor choices every since.

I used Joe a lot, then Nano. Yes, Nano. I once had a (prominent?) figure in
the startup community walk past my desk and tell me he'd fire me if I worked
for him, because it couldn't be productive to work in an editor like that. To
this day I think it's fine, although I've moved on to favor IDEs for static
analysis friendly languages (Java, C#, and friends) and Sublime Text for
everything else.

Anyway, thanks for Joe. It was instrumental in getting me into programming and
I think I very well might have been scared off if I had to use Emacs or Vim to
start. I just downloaded 4.0 and tried it out. Like others in the thread, it's
come right back to me. I might switch for a while!

~~~
JoshTriplett
> I once had a (prominent?) figure in the startup community walk past my desk
> and tell me he'd fire me if I worked for him, because it couldn't be
> productive to work in an editor like that.

That was a truly awful thing for someone to say. We all go through learning
phases, and making fun of someone for the technology they choose to use is
just hateful, not to mention discouraging.

I originally learned on Solaris using pico (as part of a college "intro to
UNIX" class), and I'm highly thankful for the person who sat next to me and
suggested I check out Debian. I used nano when I first installed Linux,
because nano-tiny was the default editor on Debian. I knew enough vi to hit
:q! or ZZ if I somehow ended up in nvi. _Much_ later, I learned Emacs, on the
assumption that I needed to learn one of the big two programmer's editors, and
I couldn't stand the modal nature of vim; to this day my .emacs enables CUA
mode. Much later I learned vim, partly by way of shared screen sessions with a
proficient vim user.

Or hey, if you _really_ want to make fun of my past technology choices, I used
to write VBA code 15 years ago, which in the snarking order of overly
opinionated geeks probably puts me somewhere between PHP programmers and COBOL
programmers. Some of that VBA code is still in use today, which is both an
amusing and terrifying thought.

I've had a long and winding path to the current set of technologies I use. I'm
sure many other people have similarly long and winding paths, and weren't
always using the same set of technologies they do today. If anything, that
provides a level of breadth.

(On occasion I've been known to snark at specific _technologies_ , such as PHP
or MySQL. That doesn't mean I'm going to make fun of _people_ who use those
technologies productively, especially when learning. There _is_ a time for
offering constructive suggestions about alternative technologies and the
features and benefits of using them; certainly if someone seeks out advice for
what to use then by all means recommend your preferred technologies and give
reasons for those recommendations. But drive-by snarkage and belittling about
someone's choice of editor? That's just wrong.)

~~~
bri3d
Yeah, I think/hope he was trying to be funny as it was a comment made in
passing. He also had almost no connection to my employer, so it wasn't very
scary.

It's stuck with me ever since, though, so it seems to have meant something.

Over the years thinking about it lent me the same perspective you have. I used
to be one of those really annoying anti-X (PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) zealots.
I thought it was funny but that experience made it clear to me that random
snark can really hurt. Plenty of people use plenty of "joke" technologies to
make real software people use every day, and snarking out on them is unlikely
to help. I'll still steer people clear of MongoDB especially, but it's in more
constructive ways and with a more clear eye towards actual use case.

------
NelsonMinar
I haven't seen a live project on SourceForge in over a year.

FWIW, Homebrew is still at Joe 3.7. The 4.0 source release compiles fine on
MacOS/Homebrew if you set LC_ALL=C to work around some sed problem.

~~~
jhallenworld
I certainly thought about migrating, but not sure it's worth the trouble.
SourceForge does have a fork-project button, but I've not tried it and all
patch submissions have been in the form of conventional patch files. It sure
would be nice if they came in as branches we can merge.

Hmm, I used autoconf from Ubuntu 14.04. Maybe there is an issue with it in
MacOS.

~~~
visarga
It's an honor to meet the author. I've been using joe since 2000. Still my
preferred local editor. Thank you a lot for your hard work. :-)

------
Tomte
Full windows support? Yay!

joe was the first editor I used when I tried Linux for the first time. vim and
Emacs seemed terrifying back then, and I needed very little features. Just
being able to edit config files.

The Wordstar shortcuts somehow are still in my muscle memory. I will definitly
try and see how joe fares under my current requirements for a text editor.

This is exciting!

~~~
cnvogel
I can't believe how long muscle-memory can persist!

I started programming in DOS in the 90s, and just hitting Ctrl-H in joe makes
my muscles remember the most-used chords... A very funny flashback.

------
toast0
Thank you Joe! I've been using your editor since maybe 1996; it's the first
thing I install on a new system. :)

~~~
nimz
Hmm, random question, did you work at Yahoo around 2005-08?

~~~
toast0
Yes, I am who you think I am. I'm sure I wasn't the only one using joe there,
though :p

~~~
nimz
You weren't, you got me addicted to Joe too!

------
jamespo
Love joe to quickly edit something (with jmacs alias).

At Uni we were brought up on JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs).

~~~
diydsp
Yes! Just in case anyone doesn't know, when you install joe, it adds a soft
link to /usr/bin/jmacs. When you run 'jmacs', joe checks argv[0], and if it's
jmacs, it binds all the functions to familar emacs commands.

This is very convenient, as joe/jmacs is about 1/16th the binary size of
emacs.

There are also soft links to jpico and jstar and rjoe. jpico and jstar I
assume run with bindings for pico and wordstar. I don't know what rjoe does.

------
reidrac
That was the first editor I ever used in Linux back at the university. It was
convenient because I had experience with Wordstar in DOS (3.0).

I stopped using it when I had to telnet frequently to a server to do some
remote work (circa 1998) and the only editor that was installed was vi. As vi
was everywhere and joe wasn't I just switched to vi (and eventually to vim).

I'm happy joe is still around :)

------
dragonquest
This is fantastic news! Joe is a great editor, thank you Joe Allen.

It has got just the right set of features to be a proper Unix editor that is
good at editing and delegating other stuff to other utilities. I love the run
shell in this buffer feature. The only thing I wish for is a soft-wrap
feature, since I deal with long lines quite a lot.

------
supercoder
I still use Joe as my main CLI editor, so this is great news.

------
JulianMorrison
Of all the editors I've used, Joe does have a feature nothing else matches:
the ability to edit really large files, seamlessly. Try opening two gigabytes
of debug.log in Sublime or Vim, some time. And then go make a coffee. Joe
would open that file instantly and be ready to go.

Syntax highlighting messes that up. But you can shut it off by editing the
config files.

------
xsb
I used it for a while before switching to Vim, than was like 8 or 9 years ago.
I remember throwing DEADJOE files everywhere in my computer :)

------
chillingeffect
Excellent. I use this all the time.

