Provided by: jupp_3.1.41-1_amd64 
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 ]...
jupp [global-options] [ [local-options] filename ]...
DESCRIPTION
JOE is a powerful ASCII text screen editor. It has a "mode-less" user interface which is similar 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 imitation of WordStar with many "JOE"
extensions. JPICO is a close imitation of the Pine mailing system's PICO editor, but with many
extensions and improvements. JMACS is a GNU EMACS imitation. RJOE is a restricted version of JOE, which
allows you to edit only the files specified on the command line.
Although JOE is actually six different editors, it still requires only one executable, but one with six
different names. The name of the editor with an "rc" appended gives the name of JOE's initialisation
file, which determines the personality of the editor.
JUPP is free software; you can distribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
License, Version 1, as published by the Free Software Foundation. See main.c (contains more detailed
exceptions). I have no plans for turning JOE into a commercial or shareware product. Check the source
code for exact authorship and licencing information. JOE is available over the Internet from
http://joe-editor.sf.net/. JUPP is available at http://mirbsd.de/jupp.
USAGE
To start the editor, type joe followed by zero or more names of files you want to edit. Each file name
may be preceded 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 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.
On cygwin32 systems, the special option -CYGhack is replaced by anything that comes past it (and
separating whitespace) on the command line as one option (to work around a Cygwin bug as it cannot
correctly be passed a UNC pathname with spaces as one argument from Explorer at all).
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 customise the keyboard layout, the help screens and a number of behavior defaults by copying
JOE's initialisation file (usually /etc/jupp/joerc) to .joerc in your home directory and then by
modifying it. See the section joerc below. The filename is actually .namerc where name is the argv[0]
the editor is called with.
Custom syntax files are loaded from .jupp/syntax/name.jsf in your home directory and .jupp/charmaps/name
holds custom charmaps (name here is the name of the syntax or charmap).
To have JOE used as your default editor for eMail and News, you need to set the EDITOR and VISUAL
environment variables in your shell initialisation file (.cshrc or .profile) to refer to JOE (the joe
binary usually resides as /usr/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.
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 optimisation. 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-Window
terminals 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 immediately 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.
-exask 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 when it is 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 keystroke.
-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.
-nosta This option eliminates the topmost 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. See the section Environment
variables below.
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.
-hex Sets the buffer to hex edit mode.
-wordwrap
Joe wraps the previous word when you type past the 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. For example, joe,
jstar, rjoe and jupp support -keymap cua to make ^Z, ^X, ^C and ^V do the same thing as in
contemporary GUI editors.
These options can also be specified in the joerc file. They can be set depending on the filename
extension. Programs (.c, .h or .p extension) usually have autoindent enabled. Wordwrap is enabled on
other files, but rc files have it disabled.
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. Python 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 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 initialisation 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.
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 or a line beginning with a period ("."). Lines can be
indented by tab, any of the !#$%&)*+,-./:;=>?@\]^_|}~ characters or spaces.
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.
Overtype 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 overtype mode with ^T T. When the editor is
in this mode, the characters you type in replace existing characters, in the way an idealised typewriter
would. Additionally, Backspace simply moves left instead of deleting the character to the left, when
it's not at the end or beginning of a line. Overtype 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 overtype 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 to 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 to 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 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 as-is 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.
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 eMail 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 occurrence, l to replace
the text and then stop searching, 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 substring 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.
\+ 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 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 accidentally 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 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 keystrokes.
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 keystrokes 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 keystrokes 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, overtype mode (^T T) is also useful. When overtype 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. Overtype
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 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 SHELL or EXECSHELL environment variable must be set to the full pathname of a shell executable that
accepts the -i (interactive) and -c (run a command) arguments of the Korn Shell; otherwise, /bin/sh is
used.
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 LINES and COLUMNS environment
variables.
The xterm-xfree86 terminal allows automatic entering and leaving of the bracketed paste mode.
The JOETERM environment variable may be set to override the regular TERM environment variable for
specifying your terminal type.
JOE uses two character maps for its operation: the terminal I/O character map, which determines how
characters are sent to the terminal and whether the %a/%A message specifiers use UCS, and the file
encoding, which can be specified per file using the -encoding option and changed with the ^T E command,
and which defaults to the terminal I/O character map, which, in turn, is determined from the current
locale, if the system supports such, otherwise the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG environment variables (if
they contain a period, only the part after it and before an optional "at sign" is used); on cygwin32
before 1.7.2, the codepage is used instead if the POSIX locale environment variables are empty; the
environment variable JOECHARMAP can be used to manually force one overriding all methods described above,
and can be used together with -encoding to specify a different default file character map.
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.
THE JOERC FILE
^T options, the help screens and the key-sequence to editor command bindings are all defined in JOE's
initialisation file. If you make a copy of this file (which normally resides in /etc/jupp/joerc) to
$HOME/.joerc, you can customise these settings to your liking. The syntax of the initialisation file
should be fairly obvious, and there are further instruction in it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
JOE was written by Joseph H. Allen. If you have bug reports or questions, eMail 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. Thorsten "mirabilos" Glaser (tg@mirbsd.org) created JUPP, and the
16-bit MS-DOS version of JUPP 2.8 was compiled by Andreas Totlis (atotlis@t-online.de).
BUGS
This manual page describes only the JOE flavour; documentation for JUPP is especially missing.
JOE(1)