Posted inInformation Technology

JED – Long delay at launch issue

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
jed screenshot

Since the mailing list archive isn’t much in the way of searchable or at least doesn’t seem to be well indexed by search engines I will be keeping a series of posts on my blog with some of the “newer” and more interesting Jed issues as well as various configuration stuff I’ve found useful. Most of you have probably already noticed other posts covering this text editor. When one is working in a terminal it is one of the better ones. I put “newer” in quotes because many times they are old issues which someone just stumbled into and most of the gray cells containing knowledge of the solution sacrificed themselves to Chardonnay or some other enjoyable form of alcohol.

Let’s get all of the offensive text editor comments out of the way up front shall we?

VI is from a time when programmers lived in caves and ate their young. So are all of the derivatives of it.

If Emacs had an editor it would be a great operating system.

Nano is fine for a quick batch file edit but its WordStar type interface make it a bit tough for actual terminal level coding, especially if you need to do a lot.

vi screenshot

jed screenshot

nano screenshot

The above images are the same main.cpp file opened with each of the 3 editors on the same machine inside of Konsole terminal. No, I didn’t tweak any configuration for colors. It is what it is.

Jed runs on a great many operating systems so we get to find out which vendors actually do things right and which do a really poor job. Apple does a really poor job. A few Linux distros had this problem in the past because the script kiddies configuring those builds didn’t now how to correctly configure an environment.

This particular configuration error is annoying for a great many programs, but Jed seems to get it reported more than others. I understand why. It is incredibly annoying to type:

jed main.cpp

then wait 5 to 35+ seconds for the screen to come up. The problem is that your OS Vendor/supplier didn’t configure localhost properly. Some Apple users find the following executed in a terminal is a great fix:

scutil --set HostName $(scutil --get LocalHostName)

Some users prefer editing /etc/hosts adding the following entries:

127.0.0.1 localhost

::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback

You only need the second if you have an IP6 capable machine.

Some machines see this problem only when they have an unplugged network cable, other, poorly configured systems see it all of the time. All in all JED is trying to validate the machine hostname and cannot so you end up waiting for a network timeout.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.