Joe's Own Editor

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Joe's Own Editor
Joe 3.5, editing a C header file
Developed by	Joseph H. Allen, Marek Grac and others
Latest release	3.5 / Jul 21, 2006
OS	OS-independent
Genre	Text editor
License	GPL
Website	http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net

JOE or Joe's Own Editor is a terminal-based text editor for Unix systems, available under the GPL. It is designed to be easy to use.

JOE includes an integrated help system and a reminder of how to get help is always on the screen. The key sequences in JOE are similar to those of WordStar and Turbo C: many are combinations of the Control key and another key, or combinations of Ctrl+K and another key, or combinations of the Escape key and another key. Numerous settings are also available through Ctrl+T. The program is generally customizable through an extensive configuration file, and it supports color syntax highlighting for numerous popular file formats, a feature that is also configurable.

JOE comes with macro files that help it emulate Emacs (when invoked as jmacs; though it lacks the lisp programmability of Emacs), Pico (when invoked as jpico), or WordStar (when invoked as jstar). There is also a variant called "rjoe", which is restricted in that it allows one to edit only the files specified on the command line (which can be useful to enforce the principle of least privilege).

JOE was the default editor in some early Linux distributions, which has led to it being popular in certain circles. It is included as an option in most current Linux distributions. The development cycle halted for a while when version 2.8 was released by Joseph Allen in 1995. The development was taken over by a new group of enthusiasts in 2001, led by Marek Grac, who released 2.9 and several later versions, introducing a standardized build system and fixing many bugs. Allen returned to the project in 2004 and released version 3.0, which introduced syntax highlighting and support for UTF-8.[1]