JOE(1) UNIX System V JOE(1)
Name
joe - Joe's Own Editor
Syntax
joe [global-options] [ [local-options] filename ]...
jstar [global-options] [ [local-options] filename ]...
jmacs [global-options] [ [local-options] filename ]...
rjoe [global-options] [ [local-options] filename ]...
jpico [global-options] [ [local-options] filename ]...
Description
JOE is a powerful ASCII-text screen editor. It has a
"mode-less" user interface which is similer to many user-
friendly PC editors. Users of Micro-Pro's WordStar or
Borland's "Turbo" languages will feel at home. JOE is a
full featured UNIX screen-editor though, and has many
features for editing programs and text.
JOE also emulates several other editors. JSTAR is a close
immitation of WordStar with many "JOE" extensions. JPICO is
a close immitation of the Pine mailing system's PICO editor,
but with many extensions and improvements. JMACS is a GNU-
EMACS immitation. RJOE is a restricted version of JOE,
which allowes you to edit only the files specified on the
command line.
Although JOE is actually five different editors, it still
requires only one executable, but one with five different
names. The name of the editor with an "rc" appended gives
the name of JOE's initialization file, which determines the
personality of the editor.
JOE is free software; you can distribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation. I have no plans
for turning JOE into a commercial or share-ware product.
JOE is available over the Internet by anonymous FTP from
ftp.std.com, file: src/editors/joe*.tar.Z.
Usage
To start the editor, type joe followed by zero or more names
of files you want to edit. Each file name may be preceeded
by a local option setting (see the local options table which
follows). Other global options, which apply to the editor
as a whole, may also be placed on the command line (see the
global options table which follows). If you are editing a
new file, you can either give the name of the new file when
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you invoke the editor, or in the editor when you save the
new file. A modified syntax for file names is provided to
allow you to edit program output, standard input/output, or
sections of files or devices. See the section Filenames
below for details.
Once you are in the editor, you can type in text and use
special control-character sequences to perform other editing
tasks. To find out what the control-character sequences
are, read the rest of this man page or type ^K H for help in
the editor.
Now for some obscure computer-lore:
The ^ means that you hold down the Control key while
pressing the following key (the same way the Shift key works
for uppercase letters). A number of control-key sequences
are duplicated on other keys, so that you don't need to
press the control key: ESC will work in place of ^[, Del
will work in place of ^?, Backspace will work in place of
^H, Tab will work in place of ^I, Return or Enter will work
in place of ^M and Linefeed will work in place of ^J. Some
keyboards may give you trouble with some control keys. ^_,
^^ and ^@ can usually be entered without pressing shift
(I.E., try ^-, ^6 and ^2). Other keyboards may reassign
these to other keys. Try: ^., ^, and ^/. ^SPACE can
usually be used in place of ^@. ^\ and ^] are interpreted
by many communication programs, including telnet and kermit.
Usually you just hit the key twice to get it to pass through
the communication program.
Once you have typed ^K H, the first help window appears at
the top of the screen. You can continue to enter and edit
text while the help window is on. To page through other
topics, hit ^[, and ^[. (that is, ESC , and ESC .). Use ^K
H to dismiss the help window.
You can customize the keyboard layout, the help screens and
a number of behavior defaults by copying JOE's
initialization file (usually /usr/local/lib/joerc) to .joerc
in your home directory and then by modifying it. See the
section joerc below.
To have JOE used as your default editor for e-mail and News,
you need to set the EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables
in your shell initialization file (.cshrc or .profile) to
refer to JOE (joe usually resides as /usr/local/bin/joe).
There are a number of other obscure invocation parameters
which may have to be set, particularly if your terminal
screen is not updating as you think it should. See the
section Environment variables below.
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Command Line Options
The following global options may be specified on the command
line:
-asis
Characters with codes above 127 will be sent to the
terminal as-is, instead of as inverse of the
corresponding character below 128. If this does not
work, check your terminal server.
-backpath path
If this option is given, backup files will be stored in
the specified directory instead of in each file's
original directory.
-baud nnn
Set the baud rate for the purposes of terminal screen
optimization. Joe inserts delays for baud rates below
19200, which bypasses tty buffering so that typeahead
will interrupt the screen output. Scrolling commands
will not be used for 38400 baud. This is useful for
X-terms and other console ttys which really aren't
going over a serial line.
-beep
Joe will beep on command errors and when the cursor
goes past extremes.
-columns nnn
Sets the number of screen columns.
-csmode
Continued search mode: a search immediatly following a
search will repeat the previous search instead of
prompting for new string. This is useful for the the
^[S and ^[R commands and for when joe is trying to be
emacs.
-dopadding
Joe usually assumes that there is some kind of flow
control between it and the tty. If there isn't, this
option will make joe output extra ^@s to the tty as
specified by the termcap entry. The extra ^@s allow
the terminal to catch up after long terminal commands.
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This option makes ^KX verify the file name that it's
about to write.
-force
This option makes sure that the last line of the file
has a line-feed which it's saved.
-help
The editor will start with the help screen on if this
option is given.
-keepup
Normally the column number and control-key prefix
fields of the status lines are on a one second delay to
reduce CPU consumption, but with this option they are
updated after each key-stroke.
-lightoff
The block highlighting will go away after any block
command if this option is given.
-lines nnn
Sets the number of screen lines.
-marking
Text between ^KB and the cursor is highlighted (use
with -lightoff and a modified joerc file to have drop-
anchor style block selection).
-mid If this option is set and the cursor moves off the
window, the window will be scrolled so that the cursor
is in the center. This option is forced on slow
terminals which don't have scrolling commands.
-nobackups
This option prevents backup files.
-nonotice
This option prevent the copyright notice from being
displayed when the editor starts.
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This option eliminates the top-most status line. It's
nice for when you only want to see your text on the
screen or if you're using a vt52.
-noxon
Attempt to turn off ^S/^Q processing. This is useful
for when joe is trying to be WordStar or EMACS.
-orphan
When this option is active, extra files on the command
line will be placed in orphaned buffers instead of in
extra windows. This is useful for when joe is trying
to be emacs.
-pg nnn
This specifies the number of lines to keep after
PgUp/PgDn (^U/^V). If -1 is given, half the window is
kept.
-skiptop nnn
Don't use the top nnn lines of the screen. Useful for
when joe is used as a BBS editor.
Each of these options may be specified in the joerc file as
well. In addition, the NOXON, BAUD, LINES, COLUMNS and
DOPADDING options may be specified with environment
variables.
The JOETERM environment variable may be set to override the
regular TERM environment variable for specifying your
terminal type.
The following options may be specified before each filename
on the command line:
+nnn The cursor starts on the specified line.
-crlf
Joe uses CR-LF as the end of line sequence instead of
just LF. This is for editing MS-DOS or VMS files.
-wordwrap
Joe wraps the previous word when you type past the
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right margin.
-autoindent
When you hit Return on an indented line, the
indentation is duplicated onto the new line.
-overwrite
Typing overwrites existing characters instead of
inserting before them.
-lmargin nnn
Sets the left margin.
-rmargin nnn
Sets the right margin.
-tab nnn
Sets the tab width.
-indentc nnn
Sets the indentation character for ^K, and ^K. (32 for
SPACE, 9 for TAB).
-istep nnn
Sets the indentation step for ^K, and ^K..
-linums
Line numbers are displayed before each line.
-rdonly
The file is read only.
-keymap name
Use an alternate section of the joerc file for the key
sequence bindings.
These options can also be specified in the joerc file. They
can be set depending on the file-name extension. Programs
(.c, .h or .p extension) usually have autoindent enabled.
Wordwrap is enabled on other files, but rc files have it
disabled.
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Editing Tasks
Basic Editing
When you type characters into the editor, they are normally
inserted into the file being edited (or appended to the file
if the cursor is at the end of the file). This is the
normal operating mode of the editor. If you want to replace
some existing text, you have to delete the old text before
or after you type in the replacement text. The Backspace
key can be used for deleting text: move the cursor to right
after the text you want to delete and hit Backspace a number
of times.
Hit the Enter or Return key to insert a line-break. For
example, if the cursor was in the middle of a line and you
hit Return, the line would be split into two lines with the
cursor appearing at the beginning of the second line. Hit
Backspace at the beginning of a line to eliminate a line-
break.
Use the arrow keys to move around the file. If your
keyboard doesn't have arrow keys (or if they don't work for
some reason), use ^F to move forwards (right), ^B to move
backwards (left), ^P to move to the previous line (up), and
^N to move to the next line (down). The right and left
arrow keys simply move forwards or backwards one character
at a time through the text: if you're at the beginning of a
line and you press left-arrow, you will end up at the end of
the previous line. The up and down arrow keys move forwards
and backwards by enough characters so that the cursor
appears in the same column that it was in on the original
line.
If you want to indent the text you enter, you can use the
TAB key. This inserts a special control character which
makes the characters which follow it begin at the next TAB
STOP. TAB STOPS normally occur every 8 columns, but this
can be changed with the ^T D command. PASCAL and C
programmers often set TAB STOPS on every 4 columns.
If for some reason your terminal screen gets messed up (for
example, if you receive a mail notice from biff), you can
have the editor refresh the screen by hitting ^R.
There are many other keys for deleting text and moving
around the file. For example, hit ^D to delete the
character the cursor is on instead of deleting backwards
like Backspace. ^D will also delete a line-break if the
cursor is at the end of a line. Type ^Y to delete the
entire line the cursor is on or ^J to delete just from the
cursor to the end of the line.
Hit ^A to move the cursor to the beginning of the line it's
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on. Hit ^E to move the cursor to the end of the line. Hit
^U or ^V for scrolling the cursor up or down 1/2 a screen's
worth. "Scrolling" means that the text on the screen moves,
but the cursor stays at the same place relative to the
screen. Hit ^K U or ^K V to move the cursor to the
beginning or the end of the file. Look at the help screens
in the editor to find even more delete and movement
commands.
If you make a mistake, you can hit ^_ to "undo" it. On most
keyboards you hit just ^- to get ^_, but on some you might
have to hold both the Shift and Control keys down at the
same time to get it. If you "undo" too much, you can "redo"
the changes back into existence by hitting ^^ (type this
with just ^6 on most keyboards).
If you were editing in one place within the file, and you
then temporarily had to look or edit some other place within
the file, you can get back to the original place by hitting
^K -. This command actually returns you to the last place
you made a change in the file. You can step through a
history of places with ^K - and ^K =, in the same way you
can step through the history of changes with the "undo" and
"redo" commands.
When you are done editing the file, hit ^K X to exit the
editor. You will be prompted for a file name if you hadn't
already named the file you were editing.
When you edit a file, you actually edit only a copy of the
file. So if you decide that you don't want the changes you
made to a file during a particular edit session, you can hit
^C to exit the editor without saving them.
If you edit a file and save the changes, a "backup" copy of
that file is created in the current directory, with a ~
appended to the name, which contains the original version of
the file.
Word wrap and formatting
If you type past the right edge of the screen in a C
language or PASCAL file, the screen will scroll to the right
to follow the cursor. If you type past the right edge of
the screen in a normal file (one whose name doesn't end in
.c, .h or .p), JOE will automatically wrap the last word
onto the next line so that you don't have to hit Return.
This is called word-wrap mode. Word-wrap can be turned on
or off with the ^T W command. JOE's initialization file is
usually set up so that this mode is automatically turned on
for all non-program files. See the section below on the
joerc file to change this and other defaults.
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Aside for Word-wrap mode, JOE does not automatically keep
paragraphs formatted like some word-processors. Instead, if
you need a paragraph to be reformatted, hit ^K J. This
command "fills in" the paragraph that the cursor is in,
fitting as many words in a line as is possible. A
paragraph, in this case, is a block of text separated above
and below by a blank line.
The margins which JOE uses for paragraph formatting and
word-wrap can be set with the ^T L and ^T R commands. If
the left margin is set to a value other than 1, then when
you start typing at the beginning of a line, the cursor will
immediately jump to the left margin.
If you want to center a line within the margins, use the ^K
A command.
Over-type mode
Sometimes it's tiresome to have to delete old text before or
after you insert new text. This happens, for example, when
you are changing a table and you want to maintain the column
position of the right side of the table. When this occurs,
you can put the editor in over-type mode with ^T T. When the
editor is in this mode, the characters you type in replace
existing characters, in the way an idealized typewriter
would. Also, Backspace simply moves left instead of
deleting the character to the left, when it's not at the end
or beginning of a line. Over-type mode is not the natural
way of dealing with text electronically, so you should go
back to insert-mode as soon as possible by typing ^T T
again.
If you need to insert while you're in over-type mode, hit
^@. This inserts a single SPACE into the text.
Control and Meta characters
Each character is represented by a number. For example, the
number for 'A' is 65 and the number for '1' is 49. All of
the characters which you normally see have numbers in the
range of 32 - 126 (this particular arbitrary assignment
between characters and numbers is called the ASCII character
set). The numbers outside of this range, from 0 to 255,
aren't usually displayed, but sometimes have other special
meanings. The number 10, for example, is used for the
line-breaks. You can enter these special, non-displayed
control characters by first hitting ` and then hitting a
character in the range @ A B C ... X Y Z [ ^ ] \ _ to get
the number 0 - 31, and ? to get 127. For example, if you
hit ` J, you'll insert a line-break character, or if you hit
` I, you'll insert a TAB character (which does the same
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thing the TAB key does). A useful control character to
enter is 12 (` L), which causes most printers to advance to
the top of the page. You'll notice that JOE displays this
character as an underlined L. You can enter the characters
above 127, the meta characters, by first hitting ^\. This
adds 128 to the next (possibly control) character entered.
JOE displays characters above 128 in inverse-video. Some
foreign languages, which have more letters than English, use
the meta characters for the rest of their alphabet. You
have to put the editor in ASIS mode (described later) to
have these passed untranslated to the terminal.
Prompts
If you hit TAB at any file name prompt, joe will attempt to
complete the name you entered as much as possible. If it
couldn't complete the entire name, because there are more
than one possible completions, joe beeps. If you hit TAB
again, joe list the completions. You can use the arrow keys
to move around this directory menu and press RETURN or SPACE
to select an item. If you press the first letter of one of
the directory entries, it will be selected, or if more than
one entry has the same first letter, the cursor will jump
between those entries. If you select a subdirectory or ..,
the directory name is appended to the prompt and the new
directory is loaded into the menu. You can hit Backspace to
go back to the previous directory.
Most prompts record a history of the responses you give
them. You can hit up and down arrow to step through these
histories.
Prompts are actually single line windows with no status
line, so you can use any editing command that you normally
use on text within the prompts. The prompt history is
actually just other lines of the same "prompt file". Thus
you can can search backwards though the prompt history with
the normal ^K F command if you want.
Since prompts are windows, you can also switch out of them
with ^K P and ^K N.
Where am I?
Hit ^K SPACE to have JOE report the line number, column
number, and byte number on the last line of the screen. The
number associated with the character the cursor is on (its
ASCII code) is also shown. You can have the line number
and/or column number always displayed on the status line by
setting placing the appropriate escape sequences in the
status line setup strings. Edit the joerc file for details.
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File operations
You can hit ^K D to save the current file (possibly under a
different name from what the file was called originally).
After the file is saved, you can hit ^K E to edit a
different file.
If you want to save only a selected section of the file, see
the section on Blocks below.
If you want to include another file in the file you're
editing, use ^K R to insert it.
Temporarily suspending the editor
If you need to temporarily stop the editor and go back to
the shell, hit ^K Z. You might want to do this to stop
whatever you're editing and answer an e-mail message or read
this man page, for example. You have to type fg or exit
(you'll be told which when you hit ^K Z) to return to the
editor.
Searching for text
Hit ^K F to have the editor search forwards or backwards for
a text fragment (string) for you. You will be prompted for
the text to search for. After you hit Return, you are
prompted to enter options. You can just hit Return again to
have the editor immediately search forwards for the text, or
you can enter one or more of these options:
b Search backwards instead of forwards.
i Treat uppercase and lower case letters as the same when
searching. Normally uppercase and lowercase letters
are considered to be different.
nnn (where nnn is a number) If you enter a number, JOE
searches for the Nth occurrence of the text. This is
useful for going to specific places in files structured
in some regular manner.
r Replace text. If you enter the r option, then you will
be further prompted for replacement text. Each time
the editor finds the search text, you will be prompted
as to whether you want to replace the found search text
with the replacement text. You hit: y to replace the
text and then find the next occurrence, n to not
replace this text, but to then find the next
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occurrence, r to replace all of the remaining
occurrences of the search text in the remainder of the
file without asking for confirmation (subject to the
nnn option above), or ^C to stop searching and
replacing.
You can hit ^L to repeat the previous search.
Regular Expressions
A number of special character sequences may be entered as
search text:
\* This finds zero or more characters. For example, if
you give A\*B as the search text, JOE will try to find
an A followed by any number of characters and then a B.
\? This finds exactly one character. For example, if you
give A\?B as the search text, JOE will find AXB, but
not AB or AXXB.
\^ \$
These match the beginning and end of a line. For
example, if you give \^test\$, then JOE with find test
on a line by itself.
\< \>
These match the beginning and end of a word. For
example, if you give \<\*is\*\>, then joe will find
whole words which have the sub-string is within them.
\[...]
This matches any single character which appears within
the brackets. For example, if \[Tt]his is entered as
the search string, then JOE finds both This and this.
Ranges of characters can be entered within the
brackets. For example, \[A-Z] finds any uppercase
letter. If the first character given in the brackets
is ^, then JOE tries to find any character not given in
the the brackets.
\c This works like \*, but matches a balanced C-language
expression. For example, if you search for malloc(\c),
then JOE will find all function calls to malloc, even
if there was a ) within the parenthesis.
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\+ This finds zero or more of the character which
immediately follows the \+. For example, if you give
\[ ]\+\[ ], where the characters within the brackets
are both SPACE and TAB, then JOE will find whitespace.
\\ Matches a single \.
\n This finds the special end-of-line or line-break
character.
A number of special character sequences may also be given in
the replacement string:
\& This gets replaced by the text which matched the search
string. For example, if the search string was \<\*\>,
which matches words, and you give "\&", then joe will
put quote marks around words.
\0 - \9
These get replaced with the text which matched the Nth
\*, \?, \+, \c, \+, or \[...] in the search string.
\\ Use this if you need to put a \ in the replacement
string.
\n Use this if you need to put a line-break in the
replacement string.
Some examples:
Suppose you have a list of addresses, each on a separate
line, which starts with "Address:" and has each element
separated by commas. Like so:
Address: S. Holmes, 221b Baker St., London, England
If you wanted to rearrange the list, to get the country
first, then the city, then the person's name, and then the
address, you could do this:
Type ^K F to start the search, and type:
Address:\*,\*,\*,\*\$
to match "Address:", the four comma-separated elements, and
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then the end of the line. When asked for options, you would
type r to replace the string, and then type:
Address:\3,\2,\0,\1
To shuffle the information the way you want it. After
hitting return, the search would begin, and the sample line
would be changed to:
Address: England, London, S. Holmes, 221b Baker St.
Blocks
If you want to move, copy, save or delete a specific section
of text, you can do it with highlighted blocks. First, move
the cursor to the start of the section of text you want to
work on, and press ^K B. Then move the cursor to the
character just after the end of the text you want to affect
and press ^K K. The text between the ^K B and ^K K should
become highlighted. Now you can move your cursor to
someplace else in your document and press ^K M to move the
highlighted text there. You can press ^K C to make a copy of
the highlighted text and insert it to where the cursor is
positioned. ^K Y to deletes the highlighted text. ^K W,
writes the highlighted text to a file.
A very useful command is ^K /, which filters a block of text
through a unix command. For example, if you select a list
of words with ^K B and ^K K, and then type ^K / sort, the
list of words will be sorted. Another useful unix command
for ^K /, is tr. If you type ^K / tr a-z A-Z, then all of
the letters in the highlighted block will be converted to
uppercase.
After you are finished with some block operations, you can
just leave the highlighting on if you don't mind it (of
course, if you accidently hit ^K Y without noticing...). If
it really bothers you, however, just hit ^K B ^K K, to turn
the highlighting off.
Indenting program blocks
Auto-indent mode toggled with the ^T I command. The joerc
is normally set up so that files with names ending with .p,
.c or .h have auto-indent mode enabled. When auto-indent
mode is enabled and you hit Return, the cursor will be
placed in the same column that the first non-SPACE/TAB
character was in on the original line.
You can use the ^K , and ^K . commands to shift a block of
text to the left or right. If no highlighting is set when
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you give these commands, the program block the cursor is
located in will be selected, and will be moved by subsequent
^K , and ^K . commands. The number of columns these
commands shift by can be set through a ^T option.
Windows
You can edit more than one file at the same time or edit two
or more different places of the same file. To do this, hit
^K O, to split the screen into two windows. Use ^K P or ^K
N to move the cursor into the top window or the lower
window. Use ^K E to edit a new file in one of the windows.
A window will go away when you save the file with ^K X or
abort the file with ^C. If you abort a file which exists in
two windows, one of the window goes away, not the file.
You can hit ^K O within a window to create even more
windows. If you have too many windows on the screen, but
you don't want to eliminate them, you can hit ^K I. This
will show only the window the cursor is in, or if there was
only one window on the screen to begin with, try to fit all
hidden windows on the screen. If there are more windows
than can fit on the screen, you can hit ^K N on the bottom-
most window or ^K P on the top-most window to get to them.
If you gave more than one file name to JOE on the command
line, each file will be placed in a different window.
You can change the height of the windows with the ^K G and
^K T commands.
Keyboard macros
Macros allow you to record a series of keystrokes and replay
them with the press of two keys. This is useful to automate
repetitive tasks. To start a macro recording, hit ^K [
followed by a number from 0 to 9. The status line will
display (Macro n recording...). Now, type in the series of
keystrokes that you want to be able to repeat. The commands
you type will have their usual effect. Hit ^K ] to stop
recording the macro. Hit ^K followed by the number you
recorded the macro in to execute one iteration of the key-
strokes.
For example, if you want to put "**" in front of a number of
lines, you can type:
^K [ ^A ** <down arrow> ^K ]
Which starts the macro recording, moves the cursor to the
beginning of the line, inserts "**", moves the cursor down
one line, and then ends the recording. Since we included the
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key-strokes needed to position the cursor on the next line,
we can repeatedly use this macro without having to move the
cursor ourselves, something you should always keep in mind
when recording a macro.
If you find that the macro you are recording itself has a
repeated set of key-strokes in it, you can record a macro
within the macro, as long as you use a different macro
number. Also you can execute previously recorded macros
from within new macros.
Repeat
You can use the repeat command, ^K \, to repeat a macro, or
any other edit command or even a normal character, a
specified number of times. Hit ^K \, type in the number of
times you want the command repeated and press Return. The
next edit command you now give will be repeated that many
times.
For example, to delete the next 20 lines of text, type:
^K 20<return>^Y
Rectangle mode
Type ^T X to have ^K B and ^K K select rectangular blocks
instead of stream-of-text blocks. This mode is useful for
moving, copying, deleting or saving columns of text. You
can also filter columns of text with the ^K / command- if
you want to sort a column, for example. The insert file
command, ^K R is also effected.
When rectangle mode is selected, over-type mode is also
useful (^T T). When over-type mode is selected, rectangles
will replace existing text instead of getting inserted
before it. Also the delete block command (^K Y) will clear
the selected rectangle with SPACEs and TABs instead of
deleting it. Over-type mode is especially useful for the
filter block command (^K /), since it will maintain the
original width of the selected column.
Tag search
If you are editing a large C program with many source files,
you can use the ctags program to generate a tags file. This
file contains a list of program symbols and the files and
positions where the symbols are defined. The ^K ; command
can be used to lookup a symbol (functions, defined
constants, etc.), load the file where the symbol is defined
into the current window and position the cursor to where the
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symbol is defined. ^K ; prompts you for the symbol you want,
but uses the symbol the cursor was on as a default. Since
^K ; loads the definition file into the current window, you
probably want to split the window first with ^K O, to have
both the original file and the definition file loaded.
Shell windows
Hit ^K ' to run a command shell in one of JOE's windows.
When the cursor is at the end of a shell window (use ^K V if
it's not), whatever you type is passed to the shell instead
of the window. Any output from the shell or from commands
executed in the shell is appended to the shell window (the
cursor will follow this output if it's at the end of the
shell window). This command is useful for recording the
results of shell commands- for example the output of make,
the result of grepping a set of files for a string, or
directory listings from FTP sessions. Besides typeable
characters, the keys ^C, Backspace, DEL, Return and ^D are
passed to the shell. Type the shell exit command to stop
recording shell output. If you press ^C in a shell window,
when the cursor is not at the end of the window, the shell
is killed.
Environment variables
For JOE to operate correctly, a number of other environment
settings must be correct. The throughput (baud rate) of the
connection between the computer and your terminal must be
set correctly for JOE to update the screen smoothly and
allow typeahead to defer the screen update. Use the stty
nnn command to set this. You want to set it as close as
possible to actual throughput of the connection. For
example, if you are connected via a 1200 baud modem, you
want to use this value for stty. If you are connected via
14.4k modem, but the terminal server you are connected to
connects to the computer a 9600 baud, you want to set your
speed as 9600 baud. The special baud rate of 38400 or extb
is used to indicate that you have a very-high speed
connection, such as a memory mapped console or an X-window
terminal emulator. If you can't use stty to set the actual
throughput (perhaps because of a modem communicating with
the computer at a different rate than it's communicating
over the phone line), you can put a numeric value in the
BAUD environment variable instead (use setenv BAUD 9600 for
csh or BAUD=9600; export BAUD for sh).
The TERM environment variable must be set to the type of
terminal you're using. If the size (number of
lines/columns) of your terminal is different from what is
reported in the TERMCAP or TERMINFO entry, you can set this
with the stty rows nn cols nn command, or by setting the
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LINES and COLUMNS environment variables.
JOE normally expects that flow control between the computer
and your terminal to use ^S/^Q handshaking (I.E., if the
computer is sending characters too fast for your terminal,
your terminal sends ^S to stop the output and ^Q to restart
it). If the flow control uses out-of-band or hardware
handshaking or if your terminal is fast enough to always
keep up with the computer output and you wish to map ^S/^Q
to edit commands, you can set the environment variable NOXON
to have JOE attempt to turn off ^S/^Q handshaking. If the
connection between the computer and your terminal uses no
handshaking and your terminal is not fast enough to keep up
with the output of the computer, you can set the environment
variable DOPADDING to have JOE slow down the output by
interspersing PAD characters between the terminal screen
update sequences.
Filenames
Wherever JOE expects you to enter a file name, whether on
the command line or in prompts within the editor, you may
also type:
!command
Read or write data to or from a shell command. For
example, use joe '!ls' to get a copy of your directory
listing to edit or from within the editor use ^K D
!mail jhallen@world.std.com to send the file being
edited to me.
>>filename
Use this to have JOE append the edited text to the end
of the file "filename."
filename,START,SIZE
Use this to access a fixed section of a file or device.
START and SIZE may be entered in decimal (ex.: 123)
octal (ex.: 0777) or hexadecimal (ex.: 0xFF). For
example, use joe /dev/fd0,508,2 to edit bytes 508 and
509 of the first floppy drive in Linux.
- Use this to get input from the standard input or to
write output to the standard output. For example, you
can put joe in a pipe of commands: quota -v | joe - |
mail root, if you want to complain about your low
quota.
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The joerc file
^T options, the help screens and the key-sequence to editor
command bindings are all defined in JOE's initialization
file. If you make a copy of this file (which normally
resides in /usr/local/lib/joerc) to $HOME/.joerc, you can
customize these setting to your liking. The syntax of the
initialization file should be fairly obvious and there are
further instruction in it.
Acknowledgements
JOE was writen by Joseph H. Allen. If you have bug reports
or questions, e-mail them to jhallen@world.std.com. Larry
Foard (entropy@world.std.com) and Gary Gray
(ggray@world.std.com) also helped with the creation of JOE.
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