about: jstar

jstar is one of the alternate indentities for the editor joe, written by Joseph H. Allen (joe stands for Joe's Own Editor, with a recursive title to prove his hackerness), found on Red Hat Linux (and, no doubt, other distribution) install CDs, and available for download in source form via http://freshmeat.net and elsewhere.

jstar is the version that speaks WordStar commands, other than one idiosyncracy of Joe's which I ruthlessly cleanse from every machine I install it on. Joe apparently wanted to have every version of his editor show a helps-menu when given a ^KH command. This, to a committed WordStar user, is intensely frustrating, with a helps-panel popping up, rearranging the screen, and disrupting your substantially-typed-ahead train of thought instead of disposing of no-longer-wanted highlighting. It's worse than that stupid paperclip from Redmond (because you expect antiproductive behavior from those guys).

On every version of WordStar I've used, from WordStar 2.6 (on CP/M) onward as far as WordStar 5.5, which I still use on Win/DOS/DOSEMU, the ^Kh sequence hides the block previously marked with ^Kb and ^Kk. This is clearly how the gods, as exemplified by Rob Barnaby their avatar, intended a WordStar editor to behave.

On a Red Hat Linux system, your next step after 'whereis jstar' (to verify that it was included in the install, never a sure thing) should be to assume root and go to /etc/joe, if it exists, or /usr/lib/joe. The jstar file there, jstarrc, should be changed such that each of the three instances of control-K-followed-by-an-H is bound to "nmark" rather than "help". That leaves ^J for help (from the CP/M WordStar manual: "Joke: help doesn't start with J").

Of course, if it's not your machine, and you don't have the root password, or are not likely to keep it if you make such a sweeping change, you can always just copy /usr/lib/joe/jstarrc to ~/.jstarrc, and make the changes there... but in that case you're also not likely to have approval for changing the keytable-in-use in /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.kmap.gz such that keycode 58 = Control and keycode 29 = Caps_Lock, and removing the commenting from the line that says XkbOptions "ctrl:swapcaps" in /etc/X11/X86config, which means that you'll be doing awkward things with your pinkie to make control codes anyway. Are you sure you can't get root on that machine?

Yes, you can get jstar for Win/DOS, though you might need a C compiler to turn it into an EXE; but then you're limited to the 80-column screen in the DOS box, so you might as well use good old WordStar instead, if you have it. Even if jstar does have that filter-the-block capability.

Apparently Corel ended up with the source and rights for WordStar. Now that Corel's WordPerfect has won the proprietary-document-editor wars, at least for DOS, maybe they can be persuaded to GPL it for the good of civilization. And then Symantec will GPL XTreeGold, right? ...^J
(It's a joke. Laugh. It hurts less that way.)

--siaru