On a sidenote. I am addicted to Jedsoft's console pager "most". Also in the repos. With colour, search and really the whole nine yards. It's the most. So much more than more and even more than less!. Pipe to
|most
and see for yourself!
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.
It's of course available, but not installed by default, and when e.g. you git commit from console, it by default launches Nano with its counterintuitive shortcuts.
I just want a text editor with good intelligent c++: code completion, call tree generation, jump to declaration/definition and syntax highlighting - that works on the command line so I can use it over ssh.
A good intelligent code editing would either require a good pile of hacks or a completely different approach.
Common "text code editors" don't understand a thing about the code they edit. They're just supplemented with ton of hacks that produce meaningful result in acceptably high number of cases (like regex-based highlighters) but still don't have "real" intelligence towards the content of their buffers.
And with ever-growing number of hacks the thing's unlikely to be small or low on dependencies. You'll end up with another emacs/vim/etc - a fairly small cores, and then a scripting or external tool execution support to do highlighting, parsing, context-aware searching, refactoring etc etc to make them useful for code editing. (And then why bother when we have emacs and vim already?)
And, well, if they don't work, it's certainly easier to patch their hacks or pile even more hacks, rather than trying to redo everything from a clean slate.
No and I'm not suggesting they reinvent the wheel either. I also don't care if it's a "common text editor" either. It can be a full blown IDE for all I care. I just want it to work correctly and in the command line so I can use it over ssh.
I seriously doubt that there is one that works well for C++ development. Even if there was it would only work with thier own server and I wouldn't have control over updates. I simply want more control over the tools I'm relying on than what they'd provide.
In theory that would work but in practice I've found that they still don't quite work correctly.
Some need to compile the program to work. (So they can't work if the code has compile time errors) Some still don't retrieve all the correct candidates for autocompletion.
Also, it's been awhile since I've tried a clang based plugin but I can't recall any of them controlling the syntax highlighting (eg. Show false #ifdef sections similar to comments) or providing a call tree or jump to caller feature.
I wonder if there are terminal based IDEs that are specifically made to edit and work on code, perhaps aware of ASTs and working on them, instead of being text editors with language plugins.
The slackbuild.org script for Slackware 14.1 compiles in about 30 seconds on my ancient Thinkpad. Looks OK. You have to set the backspace key to generate a Ctrl-H in the Xfce-terminal preferences (this is mentioned in the info page in relation to Mac OS).
Nano gets the job done for tweaking Web pages on ssh &c. It does have some fans...
Plus it's got some Emacs (s-lang) to it although I never use it.
Also, you can't argue with 8bit clean.
It's in the repos.
Homepage: http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/features.html
On a sidenote. I am addicted to Jedsoft's console pager "most". Also in the repos. With colour, search and really the whole nine yards. It's the most. So much more than more and even more than less!. Pipe to |most and see for yourself!