Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Article submitted by Neil Stewart. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

Back in the day, when I was new to Linux, joe was the first text editor that I managed to quit without having to reboot my machine. That I am still using it today, many years later, goes to show just how simple yet powerful joe is. If you don’t want to use emacs (because what’s the point of running two operating systems?) and still can’t work out how to use vi, then joe is for you.

joe is started from the command line with joe or joe filename to edit filename. When you start joe you get a single header bar with information about where the cursor is, what time it is and, crucially, the message «Crtl-K H for help» (^KH in joe shorthand). So if you press Ctrl and K together, release them, and then press and release H, the top half of the screen is given over to a brief list of commands. And it’s here I learnt how to quit (without rebooting), how to open a new file, how to save a file. And how to move the cursor around, how to find and replace, how to skip over words and lines, how to marks blocks of text and move them about. And you can carry on working on your file —you just type— with the help up. So within a really short amount of time you’ll be up to speed.

But joe is powerful too. For example, you can process any block of text through any shell command. joe’s help file gives a good example. If you mark the block of text by moving the cursor to the beginning and ^KB, then move to the end and ^KK, then pipe the block of text through sort with ^K/ sort. joe then runs the block of text through sort and replaces the block with the result. Powerful, especially in conjunction with old faithfuls like tr and sed.

Search and replace is also easy. ^KF and enter a search term. That’s it. But search and replace is powerful too. You can reuse old search terms by pressing the up cursor key, including terms from previous sessions. You can use tab completion to complete from any of the words in your current document after you’ve typed the first few letters. Then you can choose what to do when you find it. To replace press R and enter the replace term. You can replace one by one, or replace all. ^L finds the next entry. And you can use regular expressions —this is unix after all. Again the help file has a neat example. If you search for \*,\*,\*$ (\* matches zero or more characters and $ matches the end of a line) and replace with \2,\1,\0 (\X matches Xth pattern found) the string «one,two,three» becomes «three,two,one». Bring up help with ^KH and skip a few screens with ^[. a few times to remind yourself of the regular expressions.

Macros are easy too. Start recording one of ten macros with ^K[ and then a digit. Finish the macro with ^K]. Then use ^Kdigit to play the macro.

joe has many more features. joe remembers where it was in the file when you next edit it. joe colours your C, Java, LaTeX, HTML, and many other formats by default. joe indents your source code and justifies your text. joe supports multiple windows. joe can set bookmarks. You can compile your source code from within joe (^[C) and then skip to the errors the compiler identifies (^C= next error, ^C- previous error).

Finally, joe is old, stable, and just works. It’s in version 3.5 in etch and lenny. I use it for everything, all day every day, and it never fails. Find out much more with info joe or at the Sourceforge home page.