It comes standard on a default install of Slackware. Even in current, as of now, jove is installed in version 4.17.5.5. Of course, standard emacs is also provided.
Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.
Not to be confused with JOVIAL, Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language, which ran the US air traffic control systems for the longest time.
I used to use JED when I was stuck on DOS. I was surprised to find out that it's still being maintained on github and the author recently made a commit to improve vms (!) support. https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/
I used to use jed all the time, many years ago. But a package for it isn't available for the os (opensuse) I'm using these days and I couldn't get past the configure script when I tried building it myself. Maybe I should try again.
jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around.
emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.
my first emacs experience was emacs over 2400 baud - it was amazing for what it was, but painful at that rate, plus the resources it was taking on the host, even though I was running in a terminal, were crazy, but the experience was magnificent!
later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc).
enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs.
now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.
Huh. That's a shame. I never met him, but I started my undergrad education at the University of Rochester the year after he graduated, and followed a very similar educational path to him. So I used to hear a lot about him, and pretty much everybody was using Jove (though I never liked it, honestly, and slowly converted a lot of folks over to Joe instead).
Thank you for sharing this Don. I think we can all be certain that Lynn Conway will be remembered for a long time into the future. Perhaps Jonathan Payne was jealous and resentful of that.
I used to have a government job for a while, a desk job, nothing related to IT. But of course we had computers. It was all Windows machines with really old versions of Windows and very restricted in what software they allowed. Also, when I asked the IT folks if I could have Emacs on my machine, they just asked: "what is Emacs?", and I knew I was probably in the wrong place.
As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript.
So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes.
Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadhttps://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alterna...
Think I might actually use it when I need to make a quick edit to something in the terminal, instead of `nano` or `emacs -nw`
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(text_editor)
If this is still true in the latest versions, I find it pretty amazing that something like this has been maintained all the way until 2023.
Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.
jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around.
emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.
later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc).
enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs.
now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.
Please do.
As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript.
So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes.
Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).
Is it the usage of a Lisp? The idiosyncratic keybinds? The "everything-is-a-buffer" paradigm?