joe-editor/joe releases/joe-4.2

JOE 4.2

on GitHub

New or improved syntax files for the following languages:

• Dockerfile

Usability Enhancements

• The top Google help searches for JOE include:

  • How do I save and exit? The startup copyright notice
    has been replaced with basic help for beginners: ^K Q
    to exit and ^K H for help.

  • How do I dismiss the region highlighting? The traditional
    way is to hit ^K B ^K K, but this is slightly non-obvious
    and has always been awkward. Now Ctrl-C will do it.

  • How do I close all files and exit? Now Ctrl-K Q does this.
    Previously ^K Q was the same as ^C: abort a single file.

• Restyle the help screens:

  • Make it more obvious that there is more than one screen:
    put the help for help inline with the text instead of in
    the (seemingly invisible) header.

  • Mention Ctrl-Arrow region selection, status
    and goto matching delimiter commands on the first screen.

• Remove time and "Ctrl-K H for help" message from status bar.
  Beginners often don't notice this help message, and it takes up
  valuable status bar space that power users want for the context
  display.

• Add ^KH for help to search and replace prompts. Many JOE users
  do not know about this context sensitive help.

• Provide aborthint and helphint options so that the ^C and ^K H
  hints can be customized depending on the rc file (so say ^G
  for abort in jmacs, for example).

• Enable -noxon by default (disable ^S/^Q flow control). This
  allows us to bind ^Q to quote and ^S / ^R to incremental search.

• Document ESC X (command prompt) in the help screens.

• "joe --help" now prints all command line options.

Other Enhancements

• Tags search now tries to find the tags file in parent directories
  if it does not exist in the current directory and if the TAGS
  environment variable was not set.

• Built-in calculator can now print and accept numbers in binary,
  octal and engineering formats:
  dec 12_345
  eng 12.345_0e3
  bin 0b11_0000_0011_1001
  oct 0o3_0071
  hex 0x3039

• Built-in calculator now prints and accepts separating underscores
  for clarity. For example, 4_294_967_296 instead of 4294967296.

• Enhanced calculator statistics functions:

  • dev computes standard deviation with full population
  • samp computes standard deviation with sample of population
  • Linear regression analysis. Select a region of x
    and y values, then:
    • lr(x) provide estimate of y given x
    • rlr(y) provide estimate of x given y
    • Lr, lR, LR: log, exponential, power regression

• Calculator region functions now assume the entire buffer if no
  region is set.

• Tab completion now works at the calculator prompt (and in all
  prompts which allow numeric input, such as ^KL- go to line).

• Make new regex engine (from JOE 4.1) more compatible with the
  classic engine. \y is now shorthand for \(\.\*\), so that it does
  what \* did in the old engine. Also:

  • \. no longer matches newline.
  • \* matches shortest match, not longest match.

• Add -left and -right options to control the amount scrolling when
  the cursor moves past the left or right edge of the screen. When
  the baud rate is low these are automatically set to a large
  amount. Also, these now control the manual horizontal scrolling
  commands. When these are positive, they indicate number of
  columns. When they are negative, they indicate a fraction of the
  screen width (-2 is 1/2 the width).

Bugs fixed

• Fix use after free bug which shows up as a crash in OpenBSD

• Fix bug where indent step value was not shown on ^T menu

• Fix bug where setting margin doesn't work on big-endian systems

• Fix issue where highest valued Unicode character equivalent was
  not translating to its corresponding 8-bit character. Effect
  of this was that Delete key was not working in shell windows in
  ASCII character set.

• Standard deviation calculator function was not producing correct
  results.

• Allow koi8r and koi8-r for KOI8-R in joe_getcodeset (which is only
  used if there is no setlocale).

• Guess_crlf forced UNIX line endings for new files even though
  crlf was set. Now crlf is left alone if guess_crlf can not
  determine the line ending.

• If cursor was at end of a long line and you switched to hex dump
  display mode, then hex dump was scrolled. Now scroll offset is
  reset when you switch to hex display mode.