JOE (Joe's Own Editor) compiled for Kindle

[qlob]

Originally Posted by tigran

There is a working (I just tested) Kindle 3 vim binary here:
https://github.com/skyleecm/vim-for-kindle
Just don't forget to add appropriate /opt/share/vim/syntax files (if you need them) to get rid of the annoying message on each startup saying "can't open bla-blah..."

Just saw this -- thanks!

[qlob]

Originally Posted by twobob

This is great, appreciate the linky
And a Word To The (un)Wise:
Here are those pesky codes to get yourself out
is: escape colon kuew bang
like ^c:q!
(you just haven't lived unless you've been stuck inside an editor with the rootfs rw and root permissions - with absolutely no idea of the keycodes to exit)
Ah happy days, thanks for the hookup, I've put it on the awesome pile.
Oh, and it "just works" no fiddling. on 3.4

Try
<escape> <shift> z <shift> z

to exit vim. Thats easier to remember for me at least. Plus it automatically saves the file.

[nasser]

Introduction:
Some linux retro-editor nostalgia! A linux editor with wordstar, borland-turbo, emacs and pico style behaviour.

fvek had uploaded his cross-compiled version earlier in this thread, but left out some of the juicy parts. Here's a more complete package, with a fairly bleeding edge version, a smaller executable image size and a KUAL button.

Original author: Joseph Hallen, 1993

Source: Debian-Stretch-Armel repository (normally Debian-Jessie is the one that works on Kindles, but here Stretch does, too!)

Version: 4.4-1

Maintainer: Josip Rodin <joy-packages@debian.org>

Homepage: http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/

Description(from INFO file of Debian package):
User friendly full screen text editor, Joe's Own Editor, has the feel of most PC text editors: the key sequences are reminiscent of WordStar and Turbo C editors, but the feature set is much larger than of those. Joe has all of the features a Unix user should expect: full use of termcap/terminfo, complete VI-style Unix integration, a powerful configuration file, and regular expression search system. It also has six help reference cards which are always available, and an intuitive, simple, and well thought-out user interface.

Joe has a great screen update optimization algorithm, multiple windows (through/between which you can scroll) and lacks the confusing notion of named buffers. It has command history, TAB expansion in file selection menus, undo and redo functions, (un)indenting and paragraph formatting, filtering highlighted blocks through any external Unix command, editing a pipe into or out of a command, and block move, copy, delete or filter.

Through simple QEdit-style configuration files, Joe can be set up to emulate editors such as Pico and Emacs, along with a complete imitation of WordStar, and a restricted mode version (lets you edit only the files specified on the command line). Joe also has a deferred screen update to handle typeahead, and it ensures that deferral is not bypassed by tty buffering. It's usable even at 2400 baud, and it will work on any kind of sane terminal.

Needs:

• Jailbroken Kindle
• KUAL
• Kterm
• libncurses library (kindles have it)
• libtinfo library (included here)

Works on:
Any jailbroken kindle from kindle touch onwards. Tested OK on pw1, pw3, kt3.

Instructions:

• Unzip the package(joe.zip) into /mnt/us/extensions
• Start KUAL
• Select "Joe's Own Editor" menu option
• Select which flavour of joe you want
• Press the appropriate keys to open the help menu (see below)
• For detailed help, see the full user manual(attached).

Here's small list of keyboard shortcuts to get you started(^ stands for Control key):
Help: ^kh(standard and rjoe), ^x^h(jmacs), ^j(jstar), ^g(jpico)
Quit: ^c(standard and rjoe), ^x^c(jmacs), ^kq(jstar), ^x(jpico)
Open file: ^ke(standard), ^x^f(jmacs), ^ke(jstar), ^r(jpico)
Save file: ^kd(standard and rjoe), ^x^a(jmacs), ^kd(jstar), ^o(jpico)
Save and quit: ^kx(standard and rjoe), ^x^s(jmacs), ^kx(jstar), ^x(jpico)

Kindle notes:
Joe uses a mechanism to detect with what alias it's being invoked to select the correct configuration file and change its behaviour accordingly. However, since soft links are not possible on kindles (except in the read only root partition), I've used an equivalent method. Based on the selection from the KUAL menu, a different shell script is called, which copies the appropriate configuration file into joe's home folder under the standard name.

To allow the full help menu to be visible, kterm is opened with a horizontal orientation and a font size of 6. Both these can be changed from within the editor screen using kterm's double touch menu.

Things not working:
Syntax highlighting (the syntax files location seems to be hardcoded to /usr/share/joe/syntax/ which is not possible here). Only highlighting for C and maybe some other file types works, as it seems to be in-built.

Attachments:

• joe.zip(KUAL package)
• joe-man.zip(User manual)
• joe-kt3.png(Screenshot from kt3)