Pico (text editor)
Template:Short description Template:Infobox software
Pico (Pine composer) is a text editor for Unix and Unix-like computer systems. It is integrated with Pine and Alpine, email clients initially designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
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...".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Features
[edit]Pico does not support working with several files simultaneously and cannot perform a find and replace across multiple files. It also cannot copy partial text from one file to another (though it is possible to read text into the editor from a whole 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 wider range of features than Pico; including regular expression search and replace, and working with multiple files at the same time. By comparison, Pico's simplicity makes it suitable for beginners.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Basic commands and navigation
[edit]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 Template:Key press 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 checked.
The Template:Key press 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 Template:Key press command justifies the text in the paragraph that the cursor is placed on. The command Template:Key press Template:Key press 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 Template:Key press command immediately after justification has been done.
The Template:Key press command is used to search for text. Search is done case insensitively, The search and replace command is not available by default, but must be enabled through the -b option in the command line.
Moving inside the editor can be done using the keyboard by using the arrow keys. Keys such as Template:Key press, or Template:Key press, scroll the text up or down (towards the beginning or end of the file, respectively). The commands Template:Key press Template:Key press, and Template:Key press Template:Key press move the cursor to the beginning or end of the file respectively, while the commands Template:Key press and Template:Key press move the cursor to the beginning and the end of the line that the cursor is located on.
Derivatives
[edit]A clone of Pico called nano, which is part of the GNU Project,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> was developed because Pico's earlier license had unclear redistribution terms.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Newer versions of Pico as part of Alpine are released under the Apache License version 2.0.