I never used GNU screen as its command prefix, ctrl-k, conflicted w/ the command prefix for my preferred editor, JOE, and I was always too lazy to reconfigure the bindings. tmux uses ctrl-b by default, which smoothed the way to using tmux. I'm still too lazy to learn any tmux commands; the only one I know off-hand is ctrl-b-d, for detaching, which is sufficient for my needs. Scrolling is annoying in tmux sessions because I don't remember the commands, but I compensate by avoiding tmux when I might need the scroll buffer or by tee'ing output to temporary files.

I think you mean ctrl-a for screen’s default leader.

ctrl-b ? is helpful if you can’t remember the hot keys.

I just moved screen's command prefix to ctrl-j, for the same reason, it did not conflict with Joe (in JStar mode) command keys.

That reconfiguration occurred very soon after I was introduced to screen, circa. 1993 or thereabouts.

I'm suprised anybody uses JOE as their preferred editor. I have never met anybody even mentioning it, but obviously people have different backgrounds.

I've used Unix in the 1980s the first time and learned that whatever your preferred editor is, you need to know vi, because vi is always installed. That has been true in my experience with a single exception. In a recent embedded Linux I used they had only nano available.

So what is the story behind JOE and what is good about it?

I used JOE for a long time back in the day and I remember it fondly for plastering its documentation right onto the screen so you didn't have to look stuff up, as a beginner. This sounds embarrassing but I suspect others have had the same problem so here goes:

Back in the day (in the 90s) I was just starting out with linux, and had to install slackware from floppies I carried to school and to the library, a handful of packages at a time. I didn't have documentation packages installed yet, but I did have some howtos. So I had to edit some files, and I tried the "standard" editors - vi and emacs. I didn't know how to quit vi or emacs. I'd end up trapped in them, and eventually figured out I could Ctrl-Z and kill the process for vi. This didn't work on emacs so I'd end up switching to a second virtual terminal and then kill the emacs process. I had no idea what I was doing, and being unable to get out of a program and get back into a safe known state was quite traumatic to teenage me just getting into unixy stuff. JOE was there for me. It did what I needed it to do, it told me how to operate it, and I never once got stuck in it. Out of gratitude, I used it exclusively for years. It's zero bullshit, it edits files, it doesn't let you down.

wordstar. If you are used to wordstar, joe is a blessing.

There are a few greybeards and I mean that literally who swear on WordStar, GRRM most famous of them but Robert J. Sawyer does too. So it's not unreasonable to think there are other, less famous people who still use it? and want to use an editor with the familiar keybindings.

Not me. I am completely up to date with software and my favorite word processor is WordPerfect 5.1.

Also, Turbo Pascal 3.x's editor took Wordstar shortcuts. Only years later high school me only learnt that those strange ctrl-k commands were archeological artifacts...

I am ashamed but I forgot the Turbo Pascal hotkeys :( it's been ... a long , long time since I opened TURBO.COM. Some of these do fall out of memory. I once knew the full 300+ opcode list for the Z80 so I could read machine code and disassemble it in my head, now I only remember C9 being RET :( I blame high school, it was too intensive and it crowded this out of my head.

I launched it a couple of years ago to show my kids what I did as a kid. I had forgotten pretty much every bit of Pascal (and I actually wrote Object Pascal at the end of the 90s!) But all that writeln stuff has left my brain.

I use JOE in its "emacs-ish keybindings" mode (which you get if you run it as 'jmacs') for small "just run an editor in a terminal to edit this config file" jobs. I wanted an editor which was fast to start up, terminal-based, and emacs-like, and this was the one I found 20 years ago. It's always been reliable and it's always been available as a Debian package, so I've never felt a need to look for something else.

For long running edit sessions I use real emacs; I know you can set that up in a client-server arrangement to avoid the startup speed problem, but I never had the effort to investigate that; besides, sometimes you want to edit a file as root, who won't have a long-running emacs.

For editing a file as root in emacs, you can use TRAMP to connect to your same machine as the root user. I think you also have to toggle a read-only mode afterward.

try this: emacsclient [-n] -c -a ""

Piping output to a file is much more preferable in my opinion, but you can access scrollback with ctrl-b [, then j/k for up down and ctrl-u/ctrl-d for jumping up/down.