JOE 3.7

JOE - Full featured terminal-based screen editor.

JOE is a full featured terminal-based screen editor. JOE has been around since 1988 and comes standard with many Linux distributions.

JOE is a blending of MicroPro's venerable microcomputer word processor WordStar and Richard Stallman's famous LISP based text editor GNU-EMACS (but it does not use code from either program): most of the basic editing keys are the same as in WordStar as is the overall feel of the editor. JOE also has some of the key bindings and many of the powerful features of EMACS.

JOE is written in C and its only dependency is libc. This makes JOE very easy to build (just "configure" and "make install"), making it feasible to include on small systems and recovery disks.

Much of the look and feel of JOE is determined by its simple configuration file "joerc". Several variants of the editor are installed by default in addition to "joe": "jmacs" (emulate GNU-EMACS), "jstar" emulate WordStar, "jpico" emulate the Pine mailer editor PICO and "rjoe"- a restricted version of JOE which allows the used to only edit the file given on the command line. JOE is linked to several names. The name which is used to invoke the editor with "rc" tacked on the end gives the name of configuration file to use. It is thus easy for you to make your own variant if you want. Also you can customize the editor by copying the system "joerc" file to your home directory.