Wow! Now that I'm doing the writing, I've actually begun to pay attention to all that joe offers, and I stumbled onto a wealth of things I didn't even know existed. This editor has far more to it than initially meets the eye. My eyes had Never picked up the phrase one can plainly read at the top of the Help window when you first type ^KH—the bit saying
more help with ESC . ([.) |
I saw it just tonight as I began to write this document, and tried it. What other goodies I found really impressed this non-geek! Macros, special searches, bookmarks, a calculator, having multiple files open (multiple windows), and running a shell (command prompt) in a second window on top of your file are just part of the rest of this really nice editor.
Additionally, I have found joe to be invaluable as my email editor. It automatically does a cool trick when you are fashioning a response to a message and want to reformat the reply. When one quotes another person the quoted part sometimes gets blown off the page, extending beyond the normal limit of columns. This also happens when the other person doesn't properly line wrap their messages. On reformatting such cases, joe automatically adds more quote characters to accomodate new lines mandated by proper wrapping of the lines.
The shell session I'm also intrigued with, as it effectively becomes a whole new document. You can copy stuff over to your own document directly, save the session (which you end by typing `exit') to its own file, or just stop and close this new file with a ^C to get back to your original document.