Pico HowDoI

The message composition editor of the Pine® system is available as a stand-alone program, called PICO. Pico (pronounced pee'ko) is a simple, screen-oriented text editor. When using Pico, commands are listed at the bottom of the screen and context-sensitive help is always available. As text is typed it is immediately inserted into the text.

What is PICO?

Where to get help

The primary documentation for pico is provided by context sensitive help screens. A standard Unix manual page is available by typing:

   % man pico

Starting Pico

To invoke Pico, at the Unix prompt type:

   % pico <file.txt>

Where <file.txt> represents the file you want to create or edit.

Exiting Pico

To exit from your editing session, use the Exit command '^X'. If you did not make any changes to the file or if you already saved the changes, you are returned to the system prompt. If you did make changes which are not already saved, you are prompted as follows:

   Modified buffer: Save before leaving (y/n)?

If you respond with 'y' the name of the file you are editing is displayed. For our example that is:

   File Name to write : file.txt

To change the name of the file at this point, use the arrow delete keys to edit the file name you are prompted with. If you choose a file name that already exists (say, 'file.foo') then it prompts with a warning:

   File "file.foo" exists, OVERWRITE? [n] :

The 'n' in square brackets means that is suggested as a default and you need to type 'y' to go ahead and do the overwrite. If you press RETURN, that is the same as typing the default answer.

Other Editors

Pico is an excellent simple editor for creating and editing small files, and for creating and editing e-mail messages (within Pine), but its simplicity may be a serious limitation for more complex situations -- such as developing software or creating long documents. There are alternative editors and the following are widespread in the Unix world and are available on our central Unix and linux systems:

vi, the traditional Unix full-screen editor
vim, an enhanced text editor that is upwards compatible to vi
emacs, a more powerful, extensible, customizable Unix editor
ed, a line editor
ex, a line editor that is a subset of vi
nedit, a GUI style editor for text files, for users of X workstations and X terminals

last updated: 08 august 2000