Pico (text editor)

Pico is a text editor for Unix computer systems, and is integrated with the Pine (email client) email client, 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, such as in order to copy-paste a text fragment from one file to another, and text replace (replacing a string with another one). It does support string search to locate appearance of a particular text fragment in the file. Pico also supports search and replace operations by typing ctrl+w followed by ctrl+r, which will bring up an interface with which the operations are performed.

Pico is generally used by those who are new to Unix, but many experienced users compose email with it as well. Pico s interface is in many ways very similar to that found in Microsoft Windows editors, such as Notepad.

By comparison, the powerful Unix-platform text editors such as Vi and Emacs provide practically all functionality imaginable in a text processor, including regular expression search and replace, working with multiple files, and much more. However, they are generally harder to master and use.

The GNU project has a clone of Pico called Nano (text editor). Nano was developed because Pico s software license is not considered to be a free software license based on sets of rules such as the DFSG.

=See also=

*List of text editors *Comparison of text editors

=External links=

*[http://www.washington.edu/pine/ The Pine Information Center at the University of Washington] **[http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/whatis.html Pine FAQ]