Pico (text editor)
| Developer(s) | University of Washington |
|---|---|
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Unix like |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Text editor |
| License | Apache License |
| Website | http://www.washington.edu/pine/ |
Pico (Pine composer) is a text editor for Unix and Unix-based computer systems. It is integrated with the Pine e-mail client, which was designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington.
From the Pine FAQ: "Pine's message composition editor is also available as a separate stand-alone program, called PICO. PICO is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker..."
Pico does not support working with several files simultaneously and cannot perform a find and replace across multiple files. It also cannot copy text from one file to another (though it is possible to read text into the editor from a file in its working directory). Pico does support search and replace operations.
By comparison, some popular Unix text editors such as vi and Emacs provide a greater number of features than Pico, including regular expression search and replace, and working with multiple files at the same time. However, they are generally harder to learn.
A clone of Pico called nano, which is part of the GNU Project, was developed because Pico's earlier license was not copyleft. Newer versions of Pico as part of Alpine are released under the Apache License.
Pico features a number of commands for editing. Arrow keys move the cursor a character at the time in the direction of the movement. Inserting a character is done by pressing the corresponding character key in the keyboard, while giving commands (such as save, spell check, justify, search, etc.) is done using a control key.
The CTRL-T command is used to spell check. The speller is defined from the command line using the -s option. When a person writes files in different languages, the speller can be set to be a script that interacts with the user to select the language to be spelled.
The CTRL-J command is used to left justify text. Text is flowed in each line of a paragraph up to a limit set with the -r option in the command line. If no limit is given in the command line, then a default value of 72 characters per line is used. This limit is used to wrap lines during composition, as well as to justify text. The CTRL-J command justifies the text in the paragraph that the cursor is placed on. The command CTRL-W CTRL-U is used to justify the full file. In case that justification is not done correctly, or by mistake, it can be undone by pressing the CTRL-U command immediately after justification has been done.
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