Joy Of Text (jot) home page.

Jot is a collection of a few basic text editing functions wrapped up in a terse programming language with a customizable user interface and adaptable viewer. The native language is so terse that, for simple operations, it's often less effort to type in commands than to use function keys. There's a useful selection of functions and reasonably-sane function-key environment.

With jot it's not about the can't-live-without-it gui, it's not the fancy windowing system and not about all the gee-wiz features - It's all about the text - your text ... Maybe it's the text you've spent hours typing in and are not keen to retype, the text reports you've received from some mega batch job that went wrong and you want to find out why or maybe you're trying to suck some nuggets of information some huge document - the name "Joy Of Text" gives it away.

As it happens jot does support a mouse interface (focus to mouse, callbacks, cascading menus, popups and split-screens) within the boundaries set by xterms (or similar) and windows consoles.

Anyway, you might well ask, why should we be needing yet another text editor when there are already hundreds to chose from (about 2000 according to http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EditorIndex)? Well one good reason is that this one is better than the others, being simpler, speedier, smaller, more powerful, more flexible, less crashey and much more fun than it's main rivals.

Fun indeed! ... since when have text editors had to be fun? Well, most of us text editor users don't mind putting together a few lines of code and, perhaps, find it quite satisfying when a bit of automation saves us some effort. Now many text editors have some sort of scripting language. Of these, jot raises the lowest energy initial barrier to scripting there are no special modes or weird incantations - you just type your commands and hit return.

The jot scripting language (based on ECCE) is succinct to the point of terse. It being reassuringly simple for trivial operations and no more complicated than it has to be for less trivial ones. This complexity profile also serves to reduce the energy barrier to the use of the scripting language.

In comparison to the three main open-source rivals: emacs, vim and nano. Not only does jot match the power, sophistication and elegance of emacs without requiring the 10-year apprenticeship but it also matches the simplicity and can-do usefulness of vim. But what, I hear someone ask, about nano? Well, if anyone's still bothered about the sizes of executable in this day and age, jot is significantly smaller than that either nano or mg. Note: the linux version of jot supplied in the tarballs is actually considerably larger than either mg or nano - these are usually stripped dynamically-linked executables. By giving the install.sh installation script the -compile option, it will compile and link to a comparable stripped dynamically-linked executable.

The default startup script defines a useful set of functions. When it is necessary to go off piste, command strings can be typed in without entering any special mode. The jot language consists of about 40 terse commands and a similar number of more specialised ones for housekeeping operations. Then it's just programming - a skill many text-editor users possess anyway.

Jot came about in response to a requirement to analyze and cross-reference CAD files, CAD-system reports and source files. For these it's frequently necessary to cross-reference two or more files (maybe a violation report, a netlist and a parasitics file) to extract some nugget of truth, locate an inconsistency or identify elements mentioned in some report. That kind of activity demands a programming interface and very speedy, reliable text processing. Not only that, as chip designs have become larger, so too have the design files. Jot has acquired an approach for dealing with very large files.

Although jot's natural environment is chewing it's way through large CAD files, all that power, speed and adaptability make it extremely useful for many other text-based applications. It's quite useful for documentation maintenance and, for situations where slick DTP-style documents are required, there are postprocessors are available so we don't have to put up with the dismal word/framemaker UI.

Another thing jot's quite good at is searching for sections containing specified combinations of words or substrings - this is for useful for sniffing out interesting bits of large documents.

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