3. That single line of information

The key here is the `Ctrl-K H for help' part. Help is always in front of your face. Try it now to see what's there. Push and hold the control key while pressing k then release and press h

You can see from the help screen the variety of things available (shown below). Note that many (but not all) commands start with the Ctrl-K keystrokes (the control key is commonly abbreviated as a carat, ^ ). Also note that letters do not have to be capitalized, but that undo (Ctrl-Shift--) and redo (Ctrl-Shift-6) do require shifting. If you have opened a file, play with things to see how they work (most are real obvious). Note that the arrow keys, Page Up/Page Down, and Home/End keys also do what you'd expect. Insert acts like space, though. To change to typeover you have to invoke options (^T).

CURSOR            GO TO            BLOCK       DELETE    MISC          EXIT 
^B left ^F right  ^U prev. screen  ^KB begin   ^D char.  ^KJ reformat  ^KX save
^P up   ^N down   ^V next screen   ^KK end     ^Y line   ^T options    ^C abort 
^Z previous word  ^A beg. of line  ^KM move    ^W >word  ^R refresh    ^KZ shell 
^X next word      ^E end of line   ^KC copy    ^O word<  ^@ insert     FILE 
SEARCH            ^KU top of file  ^KW file    ^J >line  SPELL         ^KE edit 
^KF find text     ^KV end of file  ^KY delete  ^_ undo   ^&[N word     ^KR insert 
^L find next      ^KL to line No.  ^K/ filter  ^^ redo   ^&[L file     ^KD save

^ is the Control key , ^[ is the same as the Escape key, and ^[L is the same as Escape-L

The big ones to note for joe newbies are ^KD (save) ^KX (save and exit) ^C (exit without save—it will ask you about saving) ^KJ (reformat paragraph after making changes which mess up the line wrapping) and the block commands (operating on chunks of text, e.g. a paragraph).

People used to a system like Windows may begin to feel anxious at this moment. "WHAT? I have to remember all of Those Things??!!" (Shudders going through body... ;-) It's not that hard, and you may already understand how it works. Have you ever hit the F1 key to get help? That key is called a shortcut because it is a lot easier and faster than moving your hand off the keys over to the mouse, then pointing and clicking on the help menu item, often followed by a necessary second choice off that menu. Joe (and many other command line apps) uses shortcuts by default.

When you exit and save changes to an existing file, joe automatically creates a backup of the old file by appending a tilde (~) to the file's name. (This happens when you use the ^KX command, but not when using the ^KD (save, then continue) command.)

Other commands of possible immediate interest are the search commands (^KF and ^L) and the spell checker (Do you have ispell installed??). All others are pretty self explanatory. One thing I certainly recommend is playing with an expendable file for a while, learning how to get the most out of joe. Such a file is easy to get—simply copy a file to a new name and toast that one...