Navigate through it with ESC . By specifying the above, you can place your backup files in a particular directory. The second is quite self-explanatory. This option prevents backup files. This is for editing MS-DOS or VMS files.
Nobody seems to agree on tab stops.
Thus -tab was invented. Use -tab to specify your desired tab width. I should note you can set most of these options in the joerc file as well. Joe supports a fairly usable search engine with regex capability. A complementary option is the Tag Search.