In order to avoid fading completely into irrelevance, I&#x27;ve been improving JOE to hopefully better compete with Nano&#x2F;Pico.  People like nano because there is no learning effort at all.  I can&#x27;t argue with that- if you&#x27;re a student trying to write a first-year program, you don&#x27;t want to waste time being hindered by the editor.<p>JOE is already pretty simple (it says hit ^K H for help on the screen always, and if you hit it you get the basic commands), but even then I find that a top google search for JOE is &quot;How do you save and exit?&quot;  People can&#x27;t seem to see the &quot;Hit ^K H for help&quot; in the top-right corner.  Also this message annoys power users since it&#x27;s a waste of valuable status line real estate.<p>So I&#x27;m trying this for JOE 4.2: the pop-up copyright notice is replace with one-line of help:<p><pre><code>   JOE 4.2 ** Use Ctrl-K X to save&#x2F;exit, Ctrl-C to abort, or Ctrl-K H for help **
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This shows up on the bottom line which I think is more noticeable.<p>ne and emacs both show this kind of help when you first start the editor.  But in both cases, you have to do a lot of reading (emacs shows too much, and in ne the help is buried in the middle of a long copyright notice).<p>Ne is pretty nice otherwise, it almost has the Windows cua key bindings and includes column block operations.  Of course JOE is better :-)