Well Armed

JOE

The last CLI editor I want to present is JOE [14], which stands for "Joe's Own Editor," available under the GPL license. JOE was started in 1991 when applications such as WordStar [15] and Turbo C [16] were very popular. JOE's keystrokes are similar to those in these two programs. JOE can emulate Emacs and has a link to a binary named jmacs. It has similar emulations for Pico (jpico) and WordStar (jstar).

According to the Wikipedia article for JOE (Figure 4), it was included in many early Linux distributions, so it has a pretty reasonable user base. Its development has bumped along, with the latest stable release in September 2015. One nice feature in JOE is that the shortcut key for help is always shown on the screen.

Figure 4: JOE 3.7-4 on CentOS 6.8.

GUI Editors

In my opinion, GUI-based editors are a "nice to have" tool in the sys admin's toolbox; I use one every day. First and foremost, admins should know a CLI editor in case they need to log in to a system on which X is not running or it is not installed. To be honest, though, the frequency of these situations is much lower than it used to be, so knowing a GUI editor for developing code, processing and reading logs, or writing articles or manuals is a very useful tool.

In this section, I want to mention a few GUI editors that seem to be popular. I chose open source editors that I have heard about and have, for the most part, experimented with in some fashion. It's definitely not an exhaustive list, and I don't contrast features, but I do try to provide some personal insight into them.

At this time, I am not considering IDEs, which can also build and execute an application from within the editing environment. Text editors strictly allow you to edit text in documents. Although editors and IDEs often overlap, the focus here is on editors.

Atom

Atom [17] was designed by the GitHub company. The cross-platform editor is written in CoffeeScript [18] and Less [19], and its embedded Git controls  [20] have a huge appeal for developers. Atom has a large range of default plugins written in Node.js for many languages.

Atom (Figure 5) has become a very popular editor because it's very hackable and it has built-in github controls and Github is where everyone stores their code now. It is also cross-platform since it uses web tools such CoffeeScript, Less, and Node.js.

Figure 5: Atom on Windows 10.

If you write a fair amount of code and are looking for a good modern editor, take a look at Atom.