Pico (Pine composer) is a

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be ...

for

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

and

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

computer systems. It is integrated with the

Pine A pine is any conifer tree or shrub in the genus ''Pinus'' () of the family (biology), family Pinaceae. ''Pinus'' is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. The World Flora Online created by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Missouri Botanic ...

and

Alpine Alpine may refer to any mountainous region. It may also refer to: Places Europe * Alps, a European mountain range ** Alpine states, which overlap with the European range Australia * Alpine, New South Wales, a Northern Village * Alpine National P ...

email clients, which were initially designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seatt ...

. 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 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 Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, ...

provide a wider range of features than Pico; including

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

search and replace, and working with multiple files at the same time. By comparison, Pico's simplicity makes it suitable for beginners. A clone of Pico called nano, which is part of the

GNU Project The GNU Project () is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collabor ...

, was developed because Pico's earlier

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

had unclear redistribution terms. Newer versions of Pico as part of Alpine are released under the Apache License version 2.0.

Basic commands and navigation

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 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 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 command justifies the text in the paragraph that the cursor is placed on. The command 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 command immediately after justification has been done. The 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 , or , scroll the text up or down (towards the beginning or end of the file, respectively). The commands , and move the cursor to the beginning or end of the file respectively, while the commands and move the cursor to the beginning and the end of the line that the cursor is located on.

Command-line options

The following command line options allow users to configure Pico before editing a file. This information can be obtained by starting Pico with the -h command. When Pico is invoked from Pine or Alpine some of the options below can be configured from their Setup Configuration Screen by either enabling a specific feature, or configuring a variable. Below is indicated the way to configure Pico from the command line, as well as how to configure it from Alpine. Possible starting arguments for the Pico editor are: ''All arguments may be followed by a file name to edit.'' The options , and are not available in the Windows version of Pico. However, the Windows version of Pico also has four options (, , , ) that are not available in unix versions of Pico; each option is defined as follows: for Color for Normal Foreground, for Color for Normal Background, for Color for Reverse Foreground and for Color for Reverse Background. Their possible values are black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white or a three-digit number, such as 009, 064, or 137.

References

External links

* * *{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201221192501/https://www.cs.virginia.edu/diochnos/tips/terminal/pico_tutorial.pdf, date=mdy, title=Pico user guide Linux text editors MacOS text editors Unix text editors de:Pico (Texteditor)

Basic commands and navigation

Command-line options

See also

References

External links