Joe text-editor tip

[Member PDP-8]

Just a general tip about the Joe cli modeless text editor ..

Normally I’m using vi, but when I want to go modeless, I prefer to use Joe. Mainly because depending on how you fire it up, it emulates the keystrokes of

joe
jpico (nano / pico)
jmacs (light emacs)
jstar (wordstar – for us geezers with muscle-memory from cp/m)
rjoe (restricted to using only what was specified on the command line)

But the big thing missed by some I’ve introduced it to assume that the single help screen is the only one. There are many more, and even additions some might find handy that joe adds on it’s own.

Simply, to move forward one help screen, just ESC . (dot)
To move back, ESC , (comma)

ESC .
ESC ,

I found it handy when students wanted just a taste of a few different editors to figure out which they liked. The problem is that you develop muscle-memory, and switch to another version where suddenly stuff doesn’t seem to work. 🙂

I’ve loved it for years, but yawn at editor wars. Mainly because I still use cat and here-files regularly. And ed only if forced…

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I hear ya!

I have not used Joe recently but I have had it installed on many of my systems, particularly the Debian-based systems.

I have it installed now on MX Linux since I happen to be there now.

I used the jmacs alias to quickly examine a few files.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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ps lax | grep jmacs
0 1000 3271 3262 1 0 11188 5812 – S+ pts/1 0:00 jmacs yad-updater_version_4.bash
0 1000 3344 24714 1 0 6072 892 – S+ pts/0 0:00 grep –color=auto jmacs
masinick@mx:~/bin
I just tried joe, jpico and jmacs, and I agree that the help notes make it easy to use this editor even after years away or with little use.

memory use is low; I had to scroll a copuple of pages to even spot it.
With jmacs, the bindings are similar enough to Emacs that I can search, navigate or make simple movements, edits, or changes without having to look up anything.

nano uses even fewer resources, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the features of joe.

ps lax | grep nano
0 1000 3539 3262 1 0 9404 4352 – S+ pts/1 0:00 nano yad-updater_version_4.bash
0 1000 3541 24714 1 0 6072 888 – S+ pts/0 0:00 grep –color=auto nano

I tried gvim. Before moving around, utilization was light, but as soon as I ran stuff like 1G, 5G, 100G, etc. here’s how much usage shot up:

$ ps lax | grep gvim
1 1000 3661 1 1 0 235132 30296 – Ssl ? 0:00 gvim yad-updater_version_4.bash
0 1000 3675 24714 3 0 6072 828 – S+ pts/0 0:00 grep –color=auto gvim

Still reasonable, but nowhere near as nimble with memory as nano or joe.
Emacs would use even more, though they all run fast on most systems.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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By the way, vi and vim users might be interested to know about a “refactored” version of vim that has already been around for a few years. VERY similar to either vi or vim if you’re just using classic vi features, but the code is arguably cleaner, more resource efficient and fast. There is also a qt version available.
The neovim package installs it, nvim runs the cli version; nvim-qt runs the graphical version.

LOTS of good editing choices. I did notice that graphical libraries really chew memory. Featherpad, though simple, uses orders of magnitude more memory than any of these cli-based editors!

For those with plenty of resources, don’t worry, they all run very well; still, if you want light and nimble, nano, nvim and joe are very memory efficient.
Levee may be the smallest of all, a VERY tiny vi editor!

ps lax | grep levee
0 1000 7543 3262 1 0 2784 956 core_s S+ pts/1 0:00 levee yad-updater_version_4.bash
0 1000 7554 7549 3 0 6072 888 – S+ pts/0 0:00 grep –color=auto levee

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator BobC]

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Tilde is a great terminal based editor and now in the repos.

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