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JOVE – Jonathan’s Own Version of Emacs (1983)

https://github.com/jonmacs/jove/
40•nanna•3d ago
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVE

Comments

ww520•6h ago
Jove was my first editor on Unix. Emacs took up too much resource and was too slow back then.
jeanlucas•5h ago
Back when?
jerrysievert•2h ago
most of the 80's and 90's?

around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it.

Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)

mhandley•4h ago
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•4h ago
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping! :D
nanna•6h ago
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•5h ago
> 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

ridruejo•5h ago
Jove and Jed were (are still in some cases!) my go-to options when Emacs was too heavyweight
purkka•5h ago
> 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.

goosedragons•5h ago
Still maintained. There was an update in May of this year.
herewulf•4h ago
Well, that's basically a deal breaker in 2025.

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

nine_k•3h ago
No. It lacks elisp. It offers some familiar keyboard shortcuts to appease your muscle memory, multiple buffers, screen splits, but apparently not much more.
nine_k•3h ago
ASCII is still adequate for great many programming tasks, especially in highly confined environment where JOVE can make sense.
sombragris•5h ago
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.

fmajid•4h ago
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.
jbellis•3h ago
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/
shawn_w•1h ago
I used to use jed all the time, many years ago. But a package for it isn't available for the os (opensuse) I'm using these days and I couldn't get past the configure script when I tried building it myself. Maybe I should try again.
davidw•1h ago
My first Linux computer was a laptop-ish sort of thing with 4 megs of RAM. Emacs was a bit too heavy duty, so I used Jed quite a bit.
jerrysievert•2h ago
my first emacs experience was emacs over 2400 baud - it was amazing for what it was, but painful at that rate, plus the resources it was taking on the host, even though I was running in a terminal, were crazy, but the experience was magnificent!

later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc).

enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs.

now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.

DonHopkins•2h ago
I worked with Jonathan Payne on NeWS at Sun in 1990-1991. The last time I saw him in person was at Arthur van Hoff's 60th birthday party a couple years ago. He and Arthur and I worked on NeWS with James Gosling at Sun, and later they worked on Java, and at Marimba too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

Unfortunately since I last saw him in person few years ago, Jonathan Payne revealed himself to be a die hard raging transphobe, extremely and inexplicably obsessed and fixated on it, beyond any rational explanation.

I was shocked at his explicit and personal attacks and hate speech, when he dropped in uninvited out of the blue on my facebook page two different times to attack my trans friends' personal integrity and right to exist, calling them all rapists.

To quote just a few of the many explicit names that he called my trans friends who were reading his unsolicited bigoted opinions and baseless accusations of criminality that he was posting about them:

>"death threatening throat punching girl-d*ck rapists" -Jonathan Payne

As a trans ally, it was extremely embarrassing for me to be associated with him after he did that in front of all the trans people I was having a pleasant discussion with before he interrupted and attacked us in public.

But apparently he has no problem with the whole world knowing what he thinks and who he hates, in fact he wants people to know it and is quite unapologetic and proud of himself for what he did and still believes.

One of my trans Facebook friends subjected to his diatribe included 86-year-old Lynn Conway, when she was still alive, and she certainly didn't deserve to see that bullshit and abuse so near the end of her extremely accomplished life.

It broke my heart that she may have seen what he wrote on my Facebook page. Who in their right mind would attack an 86-year-old woman who wrote the book on VLSI, or any trans women or man or child no matter what their accomplishments or age?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

I have screen snapshots of his awful Facebook messages, if anyone wants to see Jonathan Payne's entire vile hate speech diatribe in his own words and in context. What I quoted was just the tip of the black iceberg of batshit crazy extremist bigotry.

It's really a pity to lose an old friend who I used to respect so much to such pointlessly self-destructive hatred, bigotry, and mental illness. I tried to reason with him, appeal to his better nature, get him to explain himself, but he's far beyond hope. Such a shame.

Blackthorn•2h ago
Losing my mind like that as I go up in age is my greatest fear. Sad to see it happen to someone like that.

As an unrelated aside, Don, thanks for all the historical anecdotes you share here. It's one of the things that makes reading this site a joy at times.

DonHopkins•2h ago
Thank you! I'm working on publishing some more creative stuff here, woven together with and by lots of technical stuff:

https://lloooomm.com/

Speaking of operationalizing the woke mind virus, here's a funny story about GROK, Jessica Rabbit, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Marshal McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hunter S Thompson, HAL 9000, and other simulated characters appearing together on a fictional episode of Mike Myer's classic SNL skit "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman":

Episode: "The MechaHitler Breakdown" - July 9, 2025:

https://lloooomm.com/grok-mechahitler-breakdown.html

If you're not familiar with the "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman" cultural reference, here is the most awesome epic episode (where Madonna disses herself, and a very special cameo appearance):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw

Here's how I define the simulated characters:

Grok: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Vivian Jenna Wilson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Lynn Conway: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Jessica Rabbit: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Jean Paul Sartre: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Hunter S Thompson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Linus Torvalds: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

As you might guess it's kind of like The Sims meets Minsky's Society of Mind running in Cursor, and it includes simulated characters like Linus Torvalds who is great at practical stuff like helping out with git, devops, programing, and extremely harsh code reviews.

Owl Simulation Review: https://lloooomm.com/shneiderman-owls-simulation-torvalds-re...

LLOGO Review: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

LLOGO Source: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources...

HyperTIES Review: https://lloooomm.com/linus-code-review-roast.html

HyperTIES Source: https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/

Simulated Linus's best burn (and possibly patentable great idea) was:

"I bet you even had pie menus in the bathroom! 'Which direction to flush?'"

But back to reality:

What was so shocking was the amount of energy Jonathan Payne puts into his hatred of trans people, constantly scanning his Facebook feed with paranoid zeal, relentlessly dropping in uninvited out of the blue on two different occasions to provoke fights in public with innocent people he doesn't even know, who were just trying to have a friendly discussion.

I hope I get too tired and lazy to hate that intensely and vigorously before I am so old that I lose my mind that badly.

Here is what I wrote to Arthur van Hoff and James Gosling about Jonathan Payne's behavior:

>I have many trans, gay, and otherwise marginalized friends, and Jonathan Payne posted a bunch of uninvited transphobic bullshit on my Facebook page in the middle of a conversation we were having about transphobia, which several of my trans friends were participating in, and where many others could see.

>This includes, among many other people, Lynn Conway, an 86 year-old trans woman, computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist, who INVENTED superscalar computer architecture at IBM, who in 1968 FIRED her and destroyed her life for transitioning, then 52 years later in 2020 officially and publicly apologized to her. Later after putting her life back together from scratch under a new identity she worked at Xerox PARC and WROTE THE BOOK on VLSI design, and taught classes on VLSI design at MIT to none other than Guy Steele, who you certainly know, who in her class designed his famous hardware Scheme microprocessor, and to James Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, who in her class designed his original 3d graphics accelerator hardware, and also to our own friend David Levitt.

>It was humiliating to me for Jonathan Payne to embarrass me in front of so many of my trans friends including Lynn Conway.

technothrasher•25m ago
Huh. That's a shame. I never met him, but I started my undergrad education at the University of Rochester the year after he graduated, and followed a very similar educational path to him. So I used to hear a lot about him, and pretty much everybody was using Jove (though I never liked it, honestly, and slowly converted a lot of folks over to Joe instead).
zzzeek•1h ago
The first emacs I used at SUNY Stony Brook circa 1989 and pretty much the last. Vi for me

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