JE consists of software to display, input, edit, format, and print Japanese documents, as well as small but fancy made-in-Japan software. For example, kon, kterm and pxvt display Japanese documents on console or in the X-window system. Wnn, Canna, and sj3 are what we call ``Japanese input methods'' (or JIM) which convert an input string from standard keyboards into Japanese characters, words, phrases or symbols. Editors included are a Japanese vi clone, NEmacs (Nihongo [=Japanese] Emacs), and Mule (Multilingual Emacs). Japanese TeX system typesets beautiful or exotic(?) documents. Oneko is a cute mouse-cursor chaser for the X-window system. In addition, there are several programs prepared to read/write electronic mail and news, to convert among character code sets, and to handle Japanese characters in command line under Linux. See section E for more details.
Binaries in JE are made to handle the EUC-J character code set for electronic Japanese whenever choice is necessary at the time of compilation. This code set is most popular for UNIX workstations. Some software requires re-compilation to support SJIS, while others are run-time configurable. SJIS or Shift-JIS is the code set used by MS-DOS and other personal computers. JIS code set, yet another encoding, is widely used on the net to exchange Japanese information among computer systems. This is the only popular 7-bit code set with escape sequences, and others assign a two-byte 8-bit code for each letter. It is supported by editors and network related software in JE. This diversity is due to historical reasons, and developers couldn't come up with a better solution to this issue. Note that ``nkf'' will detect and convert among these three popular code sets.