JOE 4.6 for Windows

• Enhancements

  • Upgrade to Unicode 10.0.0. Add configure environment variable
    that allows you select Unicode 8.0.0, 9.0.0 or 10.0.0.

  • Install Gnome .desktop files for JOE. This allows you to use JOE
    in GUI "Open With" mouse actions.

  • Support strikeout and double-underline attributes for the few terminal
    emulators that support them. Use "stricken" and "dunderline" in
    the syntax files, or \s and \z in help screens and status line.

• Bugs fixed

  • Fix bug where JOE would sometimes crash when editing shell
    scripts. This was due to an obscure bug in the syntax highlighter:
    'reset' command (used for default state) was incorrectly messing
    with stack.

  • -highlighter_context was missing from many file types, which
    negated some improvements from the previous version.

  • Fixed signed char overflow with old style mouse events in large
    windows

  • Fix bug where path restart (//) was being applied to block filter
    command prompt. Strange things would happen if you had adjacent
    slashes in command arguments.

  • Allow ~ expansion but suppress path restart (//) in compiler error
    parsing.

  • Restore default handling of SIGPIPE and SIGINT for shell commands.
    This fixes an issue where SIGPIPE doesn't terminate a process as
    expected, for example by the head -n 10 in: ^K R !sh -c 'while :;
    do echo y; done' | head -n 10. This issue only occurred in
    read/write to !, JOE already did the right thing for shell windows
    and the filter region through shell command.

  • Improve screen update algorithm so that spaces at the ends of
    lines are always emitted. This allows them to be preserved when
    cutting text with the mouse from a terminal emulator window.

  • Improve efficiency of screen update algorithm: JOE had been
    resetting attributes such as background color before performing
    cursor motions (probably as work around for bugs in old terminal
    emulators). This made screen update slow when there were many
    attributes, as with syntax highlighting and color schemes. It was
    also repeatedly emitting ESC [ K.

  • Switch JOE to issue scrolling commands, even at high baud rates
    (before this, JOE issued scrolling commands only at 19200 and
    below because it used to be that simple screen refresh was faster
    than scrolling in terminal emulators. But this is no longer true
    with complex screens involving color schemes, unicode and
    highlighting).

• Windows version

  • Fix file access checks. Inaccessible files due to ACL's weren't
    correctly detected. This was a regression in 4.5.

  • Check the correct (Windows) path in the home directory for color
    schemes. This was not re-implemented properly in 4.5.

JOE 4.6

• Enhancements

  • Upgrade to Unicode 10.0.0. Add configure environment variable
    that allows you select Unicode 8.0.0, 9.0.0 or 10.0.0.

  • Install Gnome .desktop files for JOE. This allows you to use JOE
    in GUI "Open With" mouse actions.

  • Support strikeout and double-underline attributes for the few terminal
    emulators that support them. Use "stricken" and "dunderline" in
    the syntax files, or \s and \z in help screens and status line.

• Bugs fixed

  • Fix bug where JOE would sometimes crash when editing shell
    scripts. This was due to an obscure bug in the syntax highlighter:
    'reset' command (used for default state) was incorrectly messing
    with stack.

  • -highlighter_context was missing from many file types, which
    negated some improvements from the previous version.

  • Fixed signed char overflow with old style mouse events in large
    windows

  • Fix bug where path restart (//) was being applied to block filter
    command prompt. Strange things would happen if you had adjacent
    slashes in command arguments.

  • Allow ~ expansion but suppress path restart (//) in compiler error
    parsing.

  • Restore default handling of SIGPIPE and SIGINT for shell commands.
    This fixes an issue where SIGPIPE doesn't terminate a process as
    expected, for example by the head -n 10 in: ^K R !sh -c 'while :;
    do echo y; done' | head -n 10. This issue only occurred in
    read/write to !, JOE already did the right thing for shell windows
    and the filter region through shell command.

  • Improve screen update algorithm so that spaces at the ends of
    lines are always emitted. This allows them to be preserved when
    cutting text with the mouse from a terminal emulator window.

  • Improve efficiency of screen update algorithm: JOE had been
    resetting attributes such as background color before performing
    cursor motions (probably as work around for bugs in old terminal
    emulators). This made screen update slow when there were many
    attributes, as with syntax highlighting and color schemes. It was
    also repeatedly emitting ESC [ K.

  • Switch JOE to issue scrolling commands, even at high baud rates
    (before this, JOE issued scrolling commands only at 19200 and
    below because it used to be that simple screen refresh was faster
    than scrolling in terminal emulators. But this is no longer true
    with complex screens involving color schemes, unicode and
    highlighting).

JOE 4.5 for Windows

• Enhancements

  • New color scheme feature, which can be accessed with ^T S or
    by setting the -colors option.

  • 24-bit color support
    can be enabled by setting the COLORTERM environment variable to
    truecolor or 24bit.

  • Several schemes included in-the-box:

    • gruvbox by Pavel Pertsev

    • ir_black by Todd Werth

    • molokai by Tomas Restrepo

    • solarized by Ethan Schoonover

    • wombat by Lars H. Nielsen

    • xoria by Dmitriy Y. Zotikov

    • zenburn by Jani Nurminen

  • The current line can be highlighted by pressing ^T U or by
    enabling the -hiline option.

  • The gutter containing line numbers has a dynamic size based on the
    length of the file, rather than a fixed size of 10.

  • Updated all language syntax files to use comment_todo and
    string/comment contexts where appropriate.

  • Now pass character which invoked a macro to each macro step and
    call. If a macro step happens to be the 'type' command, the
    character which invoked the macro will be typed in. For example,
    this macro will type three 'X's. Before this change you got three
    NULs.

    type,type,type X

• Bugs fixed

  • Fix exsave: (^K ^X) should close file when a block is present in
    the window, and the file is unmodified (regression from ^C change
    in 4.2).

  • Fix regex assertions: they were not working because the character
    before the search position was not being loaded.

  • For jmacs: ^Q^J now again inserts \n in the string replace prompt.
    This broke beginning with JOE 4.0.

  • Don't try to open files for writing to check file access. This
    behaves better on unionfs mounts.

  • Fix stray blocks created after find/replace.

• Windows version

  • Fix inability to set indent step to 1 from menu.

  • Add support for math functions, fix engineering display.

  • Fix backslash escapes in find/replace.

  • Support italicized text.

JOE 4.5

• Enhancements

  • New color scheme feature, which can be accessed with ^T S or
    by setting the -colors option.

  • 24-bit color support
    can be enabled by setting the COLORTERM environment variable to
    truecolor or 24bit.

  • Several schemes included in-the-box:

    • gruvbox by Pavel Pertsev

    • ir_black by Todd Werth

    • molokai by Tomas Restrepo

    • solarized by Ethan Schoonover

    • wombat by Lars H. Nielsen

    • xoria by Dmitriy Y. Zotikov

    • zenburn by Jani Nurminen

  • The current line can be highlighted by pressing ^T U or by
    enabling the -hiline option.

  • The gutter containing line numbers has a dynamic size based on the
    length of the file, rather than a fixed size of 10.

  • Updated all language syntax files to use comment_todo and
    string/comment contexts where appropriate.

  • Now pass character which invoked a macro to each macro step and
    call. If a macro step happens to be the 'type' command, the
    character which invoked the macro will be typed in. For example,
    this macro will type three 'X's. Before this change you got three
    NULs.

    type,type,type X

• Bugs fixed

  • Fix exsave: (^K ^X) should close file when a block is present in
    the window, and the file is unmodified (regression from ^C change
    in 4.2).

  • Fix regex assertions: they were not working because the character
    before the search position was not being loaded.

  • For jmacs: ^Q^J now again inserts \n in the string replace prompt.
    This broke beginning with JOE 4.0.

  • Don't try to open files for writing to check file access. This
    behaves better on unionfs mounts.

  • Fix stray blocks created after find/replace.

JOE 4.4 for Windows

• Bugs fixed

  • Fix segfault due to buffer overrun. This happens if a line
    with many backslashes appears in the status line context display.

  • Fix jmacs: ^X ^F and ^X ^B were not working

  • Build fixes for Solaris

  • Improve php highlighter: allow numbers in substitution variable names

  • Unicode tweak: treat private use characters (Co) as printable

  • Dockerfile highlighter: Add Docker new commands from 1.12,
    mark bad strings in arrays

  • Fix loading external charmaps

• Windows version

  • Fix crashing bug when using incremental search

JOE 4.4

• Bugs fixed

  • Fix segfault due to buffer overrun. This happens if a line
    with many backslashes appears in the status line context display.

  • Fix jmacs: ^X ^F and ^X ^B were not working

  • Build fixes for Solaris

  • Improve php highlighter: allow numbers in substitution variable names

  • Unicode tweak: treat private use characters (Co) as printable

  • Dockerfile highlighter: Add Docker new commands from 1.12,
    mark bad strings in arrays

  • Fix loading external charmaps

JOE 4.3 for Windows

• Bugs fixed

  • Fixed a missed merge that prevented some options menu items from
    being changed (tab width, tab char, etc).

  • Fixed bugs updating the title bar.

  • Minor memory leak/performance fix in subprocess communication.

  • (from newer version) Fix segfault due to buffer overrun. This
    happens if you a line with many backslashes appears in the status
    line context display.

• Enhancements

  • Improve memory usage by shrinking buffer header size and
    highlighter state size.

  • Improve performance of status line context display (which shows
    the first line of the function that the cursor is currently in).
    This feature was making JOE very slow on extremely large files with
    auto indent enabled (typically JSON or XML data files). Now
    the syntax highlighter computes the context display (using a new
    syntax named context.jsf).

  • Add a mode 'title' to enable or disable the status line context
    display (previously autoindent mode was overloaded to do this).

  • Disable syntax highlighting and context display in very large
    files

  • Force more appropriate modes when we enter hex dump display:
    enable overtype, disable autoindent, wordwrap, ansi, picture.

  • Handle middle mouse button in "joe -mouse" mode (before it did
    nothing). It's treated as paste (copy region to mouse) as
    expected. (patch from Petr Olsak).

• Bugs fixed

  • Do not kill region highlighting during incremental search (patch
    from Petr Olsak).

  • Negative numbers were not being recognized in blocks

  • PgUp/PgDn would try to scroll menu if the window above is a menu
    (it should do this only for completion menus associated with
    prompts)

  • Use 'LC_ALL=C sed' to get JOE to compile in OS X.

  • Forward direction delimiter matching where the delimiters do
    not begin with special characters (for example in Verilog
    "begin" / "end") was not working.

  • Get mouse to work in menus: this broke in 4.1

  • Character classes with ranges were not working for UTF-8 (as in \[a-z])

  • Apply spec highlighting to .spec files

  • Gracefully handle short terminals: fix segfaults which occur when
    trying to shrink terminal while many windows are on the screen or
    while turning on help with a short terminal. Fix similar bugs
    involving the skiptop option. JOE now works even if the terminal
    height is only one line.

JOE 4.3

• Enhancements

  • Improve memory usage by shrinking buffer header size and
    highlighter state size.

  • Improve performance of status line context display (which shows
    the first line of the function that the cursor is currently in).
    This feature was making JOE very slow on extremely large files with
    auto indent enabled (typically JSON or XML data files). Now
    the syntax highlighter computes the context display (using a new
    syntax named context.jsf).

  • Add a mode 'title' to enable or disable the status line context
    display (previously autoindent mode was overloaded to do this).

  • Disable syntax highlighting and context display in very large
    files

  • Force more appropriate modes when we enter hex dump display:
    enable overtype, disable autoindent, wordwrap, ansi, picture.

  • Handle middle mouse button in "joe -mouse" mode (before it did
    nothing). It's treated as paste (copy region to mouse) as
    expected. (patch from Petr Olsak).

• Bugs fixed

  • Do not kill region highlighting during incremental search (patch
    from Petr Olsak).

  • Negative numbers were not being recognized in blocks

  • PgUp/PgDn would try to scroll menu if the window above is a menu
    (it should do this only for completion menus associated with
    prompts)

  • Use 'LC_ALL=C sed' to get JOE to compile in OS X.

  • Forward direction delimiter matching where the delimiters do
    not begin with special characters (for example in Verilog
    "begin" / "end") was not working.

  • Get mouse to work in menus: this broke in 4.1

  • Character classes with ranges were not working for UTF-8 (as in \[a-z])

  • Apply spec highlighting to .spec files

  • Gracefully handle short terminals: fix segfaults which occur when
    trying to shrink terminal while many windows are on the screen or
    while turning on help with a short terminal. Fix similar bugs
    involving the skiptop option. JOE now works even if the terminal
    height is only one line.

JOE 4.1 for Windows

• Includes all changes from mainline 4.1

• Now includes html documentation, shortcut to documentation in context menu

• Added pop-up terminal support

  • Brought in Ryan Prichard's winpty for a better pop-up terminal experience
    (now with tab-completion, colors, doskey, and support for Powershell)

  • Can easily be configured to launch Cygwin shells

• Fixes to keep the Window title in sync with the current file.

• Better tab-completion behavior for Windows-style paths

• Code cleanup

• Added translations to installer

• Improve color scheme support

• Distribute standalone executables in addition to regular MSI installer

JOE 4.1

• New or improved syntax files for the following languages:

  • Groovy, R, Clojure, Rust, Coffeescript, Java, Scala, Swift, D,
    AVR, Ruby, Perl

• New translations

  • Chinese (zh_TW)

• UTF-16 support

  • JOE can now edit UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE files. It does this
    by converting them to UTF-8 during load and back to UTF-16 during
    save.

  • Within JOE, native byte order is called UTF-16 and reversed order
    is called UTF-16R.

  • If you change the encoding (with ^T E) between UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-16R,
    JOE will convert the file to the desired encoding on save.

• New regular expression engine

  • Old one was a recursive matcher, new one is compiled Thompson NFA matcher

  • JOE now supports full regular expressions (but as before special characters are
    escaped by default), so:

    • It now supports alternative: X|Y
    • It now supports grouping and submatch addressing with parenthesis: a\(inside\)b
    • You can specify an explicit number of matches: X\{3} for XXX
    • Or a range of matches: X\{3,5} for XXX, XXXX or XXXXX
    • \! is a JOE extension: it's like \., but matches whole balanced expressions

  • JOE also supports the standard regular expression syntax where
    these characters are not escaped.

    • Use the 'x' search & replace option for this, or use the
      '-regex' global option to make it the default.

  • Standard syntax regular expressions are now used in the ftyperc
    file (which is used to determine the syntax of the file by
    inspecting its contents)

  • Submatches within regular expressions can now be any size (up to
    the size of the disk!). Before this, they were limited to 16K.

  • Case conversion allowed in replacement string, as in sed:
    everything between \U and \E converted to uppercase.

• Unicode improvements

  • Character class database has been updated to the latest version
    (Unicode 8.0.0)

  • Switched to new character class data structure for faster Unicode
    (uses radix search instead of binary search).

  • Key sequences in the joerc file are now UTF-8 coded Unicode.

    • Also you can specify Unicode in hexadecimal like this: U+F123

    • Note that even if you are using an 8-bit locale, keys are
      translated to UTF-8 before keymap lookup. This means you
      must use the Unicode code for your character in the joerc
      file, not the 8-bit code for the character.

  • Jump to matching delimiter (Ctrl-G) now supports Unicode for word
    delimiters (for example, within XML tags).

  • Identifiers within JOE now allow Unicode. For example, variables
    at the math prompt and JOE macros can use any letter.

  • JOE now displays Unicode combining characters properly

  • Syntax files are now UTF-8 coded and support Unicode syntax.

  • Character lists in syntax files and search strings (regular
    expressions) now provide access to the Unicode category database
    and provide some other useful character classes:

    • Use \x{f123} to specify a particular character.

    • Use \p{Lu} to specify a Unicode character class: any one of
      L, Lu, Ll, Lt, Lm, Lo
      M, Mn, Mc, Me
      N, Nd, Nl, No
      P, Pc, Pd, Ps, Pe, Pi, Pf, Po
      S, Sm, Sc, Sk, So
      Z, Zs, Zl, Zp
      C, Cc, Cf, Cs, Co, Cn
      See: ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/5.1.0/ucd/UCD.html#General_Category_Values

    • Use \p{Cherokee} to specify any character from a named Unicode block.

    • \d for a digit, \D for not a digit

    • \w for a word character, \W for not a word character

    • \s for a space character, \S for not a space character

    • \i for identifier start character, \I for not identifier start character

    • \c for identifier continuation character, \C for not identifier continuation character

• Code clean up

  • Switch to ptrdiff_t for memory offsets and off_t for file offsets
    (prior to this, int and long were used). Now you can edit files
    larger than 4 GB on 32-bit systems.

  • Give up trying force all strings to "unsigned char *" so that the
    code is less weird.

  • Clean up code so that we get a clean compile even with many more
    warnings enabled. Going forward this helps find real bugs by
    highlighting new warnings.

  • Remove C usage which is illegal in C++ so that JOE can be compiled
    by C++ compilers as well as C compilers. This is useful because
    C++ compilers sometimes warn about issues that C compilers miss.

• Bugs fixed

  • Fix bug where \ was not parsed correctly within syntax file
    character lists unless it was at the end of the string.

  • Fix bug where position cursor history operations would mix
    pointers between different buffers if user had switched buffers in
    a window.

  • Fix bug where lockup would happen if you try querysave when the
    only buffer left is the startup log.

  • Default locale

    • If no locale set, default to C / POSIX, not ISO-8859-1
    • If locale is C / POSIX, set language to en_US (for aspell).

  • Improve performance where JOE would seem to lock up if you tried
    to reformat a very long single word due to O(n^3) algorithm.

  • Prevent filt and blkdel from modifying read-only buffers. This
    could happen if you run them from modifyable buffer but with block
    set in a read-only buffer.

  • Fixed issue when recording paste in a macro. If you tried to
    play the macro, the pasted text is not inserted and JOE is
    stuck waiting for the bracketed paste end string.

  • Fixed issue where syntax could not be set on command line with
    -syntax.

• Minor enhancements

  • Tab completion now works for the command and its file arguments
    after '!' in file prompts. Tab completion now works for the
    filename after '>>' in file write prompts.

  • Tab completion now handles directory and file names with spaces
    in them.

  • Backspace now jumps back to parent menu in ^T submenus (and
    remembers the cursor position within the parent)

  • Macros after :def are now allowed to cross lines in the joerc file

  • Make ^K ^SPACE same as ^K SPACE

  • Quoted insert of TAB always inserts a TAB character, even when
    smart indent is enabled.

  • Add options to control sending of bracketed paste mode command
    to terminal emulator (brpaste) and detection of paste by timing
    (pastehack).

  • Modified ftyperc file syntax to reduce redundancy

  • Added file type (as defined in ftyperc) setting option. For
    example, with "joe -type c fred" JOE will assume fred is a C
    language file. Use ^T F to change the file type from within JOE.

  • Highlighter enhancement: when % is used in place of a character
    list, it matches the save_c delimiting character as-is (vs. &
    which matches the opposite character). For example, if save_c has
    {, then % matches { while & matches }. This allows JOE to
    highlight q{hello { there } } in Perl.

• jmacs fixes:

  • ^X b / ^X ^B were reversed

  • ^X 0 printed an exit message for no reason

  • ^X 0 now can pop shell windows

  • M-^ deleted indentation but did not join with previous line

  • Ignore case for letter commands: ^X i and ^X I are the same

  • Fix bug where regular expressions were not working in incremental
    search when wrap is enabled (which is the case in jmacs).

• ESC g (grep/find) and ESC c (compile) improvements

  • Tab completion now works for the command and its arguments

  • Change to the current directory before running the command

  • Show the current directory in the compile window

  • Show the exit status in the compile window

  • Provide more consistent window setup during compile

  • Parse "Entering directory `/home/xxxxxx'" messages to determine
    the directory containing the file with an error message.

JOE 4.0 for Windows

• JOE now has pop-up shell windows with full terminal emulation and shell commands
  that can control the editor. Hit F1 - F4 to bring up a shell window.
  See Pop-up shell feature for a full description.

• The status command (^K SPACE) can now be customized using the same syntax
  as the status bar. Look for smsg and zmsg in joerc to see how to do this.

• parserr (the error parser) will parse only the highlighted block if it's set. Before it always parsed the entire buffer.

• Now there is a per-buffer concept of current directory. This was added to
  make the pop-up shell windows work better, but it's useful in general.

• At file prompts you can begin a new anchored path without having to delete
  the old one. It means that ~jhallen/foo//etc/passwd is translated to /etc/passwd.
  Prompt windows are now highlighted to indicate which parts of the path are
  being dropped. There is a syntax file for this: filename.jsf

• The error parser now ignores ANSI sequences (some versions of grep
  color their results, now JOE can still parse it).

• Temporary messages are now dismissed by keyboard input only. Before, they
  could also be dismissed by shell input.

• Tags search now supports multiple matches. ^K ; can be configured to
  either provide a menu of the matches or to cycle through them.

• Tags search will now match on the member name part of member functions
  ('fred' will match 'myclass::fred').

• Tags search will prepend the path to the tags file file name in the tags
  file. This is important when JOE finds the tags file via the TAGS
  environment variable.

• Remove ` as quote character from incremental search.

• Clean up documentation, convert much of it to Markdown.