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Jove (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs)

Jove (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs)

17 comments

·July 17, 2025
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jbellis

I used to use JED when I was stuck on DOS. I was surprised to find out that it's still being maintained on github and the author recently made a commit to improve vms (!) support. https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/

nanna

Found this intro to Jove helpful:

https://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alterna...

Think I might actually use it when I need to make a quick edit to something in the terminal, instead of `nano` or `emacs -nw`

musicale

> How small is it? The Jove executable is roughly 150K

Which counts as small now that nano has ballooned to ~400KB?

For comparison, Turbo Pascal packed an entire x86 IDE into ~40KB.[1]

[1] https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

purkka

> Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8.

If this is still true in the latest versions, I find it pretty amazing that something like this has been maintained all the way until 2023.

nine_k

ASCII is still adequate for great many programming tasks, especially in highly confined environment where JOVE can make sense.

goosedragons

Still maintained. There was an update in May of this year.

herewulf

Well, that's basically a deal breaker in 2025.

But the real question is: Can it run evil mode?!

nine_k

No. It lacks elisp. It offers some familiar keyboard shortcuts to appease your muscle memory, multiple buffers, screen splits, but apparently not much more.

sombragris

It comes standard on a default install of Slackware. Even in current, as of now, jove is installed in version 4.17.5.5. Of course, standard emacs is also provided.

Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.

ridruejo

Jove and Jed were (are still in some cases!) my go-to options when Emacs was too heavyweight

ww520

Jove was my first editor on Unix. Emacs took up too much resource and was too slow back then.

mhandley

I also started using Jove back when 30 of us shared one PDP 11/44 running BSD Unix, and it was antisocial to use something as heavyweight as Emacs. 40 years later, I'm still using UNIX and Emacs.

herewulf

Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping! :D

jeanlucas

Back when?

null

[deleted]

fmajid

Not to be confused with JOVIAL, Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language, which ran the US air traffic control systems for the longest time.

EUSSR

[flagged]