In order to avoid fading completely into irrelevance, I've been improving JOE to hopefully better compete with Nano/Pico. People like nano because there is no learning effort at all. I can't argue with that- if you're a student trying to write a first-year program, you don't want to waste time being hindered by the editor.
JOE is already pretty simple (it says hit ^K H for help on the screen always, and if you hit it you get the basic commands), but even then I find that a top google search for JOE is "How do you save and exit?" People can't seem to see the "Hit ^K H for help" in the top-right corner. Also this message annoys power users since it's a waste of valuable status line real estate.
So I'm trying this for JOE 4.2: the pop-up copyright notice is replace with one-line of help:
JOE 4.2 ** Use Ctrl-K X to save/exit, Ctrl-C to abort, or Ctrl-K H for help **
This shows up on the bottom line which I think is more noticeable.
ne and emacs both show this kind of help when you first start the editor. But in both cases, you have to do a lot of reading (emacs shows too much, and in ne the help is buried in the middle of a long copyright notice).
Ne is pretty nice otherwise, it almost has the Windows cua key bindings and includes column block operations. Of course JOE is better :-)
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your fantastic editor. It is bloody fantastic and I'm not even an old Wordstar user who just has to use its keybindings. I truly think you have created an almost perfect, light console editor. Could you please consider adding soft-wraps (only emulated, visible line breaks for long lines but no actual breaks saved)?
With that said, to console newbies - you have to try out 'joe' once. It uses the Unix dev environment fantastically and its not short on features either.
"but even then I find that a top google search for JOE is "How do you save and exit?" People can't seem to see the "Hit ^K H for help" in the top-right corner"
I would see that as a very strong hint that the time when Wordstar keybindings made sense in an editor with "no learning curve at all" has passed.
I think you should very seriously consider either having control-S for save or dropping the idea to compete with editors without a learning curve. If you want to keep aiming at the low learning curve, Google tells me that key bindings are highly configurable, so what's wrong with shipping with ones beginning users will be familiar with?
If you want to keep Wordstar bindings by default, I think your new message can be improved.
I fear that people who read "Use Ctrl-K X to save/exit" may think that Ctrl-K X will give them the option to save changes, and then exit. That can put them up for a huge disappointment the first time they want to exit without saving.
IMO, the use of "abort" for "exit without saving" doesn't help there, either. For me, "abort" signals abnormal termination, but there is nothing wrong with exiting without saving.
I doubt you can get any significant improvement that way, but unless I am miscounting
Save file and Exit=Ctrl-K X Exit Without Saving=Ctrl-C Help=Ctrl-K H
fits in that space. I doubt it will help much because people will have forgotten the key combinations seconds after typing the first character, and even if they do remember them, they will not become as engrained as the keystrokes they know work in other programs.
I am pessimistic because I see three problems with Control-K X for 'normal' users:
- they aren't used to the tiny mode that Control-X introduces (it wouldn't even surprise me if interviewing a few 'normal users' would show that they do not know what "Ctrl-K X" means)
- most other applications separate the 'save' command from the 'exit' command (web and phone apps are exceptions, but they don't use explicit save at all)
- it's not control-S (unfair? Maybe, but I would call it realistic)
I doubt reminding them "hey, this program is different" at startup will help much for that.
Disclaimer: I'm not a professional in this field and I am wildly guessing at the target audience for a simple text editor.
> if you're a student trying to write a first-year
> program, you don't want to waste time being hindered by
> the editor
In my experience, people who don't know what editor they (want to) use won't be hindered by it, because they'll use Eclipse (or equivalent) perhaps the standard GUI editor on the system (TextEdit, Notepad, whatever) or else Google 'text editor' and install Sublime or something.
I've heard professors suggest it before so it's always possible that they find out about it that way. It's probably also helps that the default $EDITOR for many systems is vi, so students using the terminal or ssh might turn to nano as an alternative.
We need to merge. The issue is that the Win32 work was based on the co-routine branch, but I've chickened out on releasing this as the main version. Also JJ just got back from his honeymoon.
JOE is already pretty simple (it says hit ^K H for help on the screen always, and if you hit it you get the basic commands), but even then I find that a top google search for JOE is "How do you save and exit?" People can't seem to see the "Hit ^K H for help" in the top-right corner. Also this message annoys power users since it's a waste of valuable status line real estate.
So I'm trying this for JOE 4.2: the pop-up copyright notice is replace with one-line of help:
This shows up on the bottom line which I think is more noticeable.ne and emacs both show this kind of help when you first start the editor. But in both cases, you have to do a lot of reading (emacs shows too much, and in ne the help is buried in the middle of a long copyright notice).
Ne is pretty nice otherwise, it almost has the Windows cua key bindings and includes column block operations. Of course JOE is better :-)