Hacker News Reader

Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

I've used JOE for 15 years. I recently upgraded form JOE 3.x to 4.4 and was unimpressed with the recent decline in quality to the point of considering switching editors. Hopping between open/close braces with ^G no longer counts nested pairs correctly; TAB now randomly inserts 2 or 3 spaces instead of the 2 I have it configured for and that my files use; and my home-key settings in my config file are ignored.

I'm completely baffled how the developers can add such bugs to a stable, decades-old product. Regardless of whether the bugs get fixed, it's shaken my confidence that I can trust JOE not to screw up my work. (Even 3.x JOE gets into screwed-up states and crashes from time to time; I trust 4.x JOE even less. Even the "save often" mantra I'm cautious about, since I don't want to save data from a screwed-up state. That's worse than straight-up crashing.)

View on HN

I'm not sure what you are seeing- it's possible the config file syntax has evolved. Anyway, if you find issues, please submit bug reports for them:

https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/bugs/?source=navbar

This is the best way to influence the development direction and we certainly do fix issues.

Yes, it looks like both the joerc and the ftyperc formats have changed in a non-backward-compatible way. At least, wiping those fixed the ^G issue for me. (I can't tell yet about the indent issue since I can't reproduce that reliably; if it persists I will file a bug report.)

Thanks for all your work developing and maintaining JOE. My apologies for such a negative earlier post; I would not get so easily frustrated if I did not rely on JOE every day :)

I used joe in Slackware exclusively throughout the 2000s until I started having issues as well. I would save a file, script wouldn't work, open it back up and my changes never committed. I switched to nano and had no more issues, and I've been using nano at the console since then (and Geany in X).

Wow. "Able to edit files and save changes to the disk" is the absolute minimum for something to count as a text editor...and that's not even reliable?

It wasn't reliable back then, but that was nearly ten years ago. I'm sure it's improved since then. And honestly, it could have been just one regression that was soon fixed, but I had already moved on and I generally don't look back when something like that happens.

Right – "fixed the bug that ate my files" isn't good enough. I need to feel confident that the next version of the software won't introduce another similar bug.

The best "protection" I've seen in this space is to log all changes to the edited document, through a simple (and therefore easy to prove correct) code path. The only editor I've ever seen do this was a Xilinx schematic editor. The editor crashed all the time, but I never lost work, since on restart, the editor simply replayed what it had in its log. (This was fun to watch!) Of course this method isn't foolproof, but it went a long way making me feel confident my work wouldn't be lost.

I once wrote a script to periodically back up the text contents of my terminals, JOE 2.x crashed so frequently (losing my work). JOE 3.x crashes less frequently, and I can tell when it's about to (block-selecting starts acting up), but it's unpredictable enough that I could in no way describe how to reproduce it in a bug report, and I often don't have cores enabled on the machines I'm working on.

I love love love the interface, which keeps me on it, but I've been bitten enough to lose trust that I won't get bitten in the future.

I've also been using Joe for roughly 15 years. Its the least crap editor that I've found or perhaps the one that I remember the key bindings for. I don't get upset about things that don't work as I want them to. I'm quite happy to use a stable and very capable editor.

Obviously if I had a real snag with it I would start with bug reports and if that didn't get the problem sorted, then I would either get my wallet out and hire a programmer or fix it myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com