Pico (text editor)

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Pico
A screenshot of Pico.
Developed by	University of Washington
OS	Unix like
Genre	Text editor
Website	http://www.washington.edu/pine/

Pico is a text editor for Unix computer systems, and is integrated with the Pine 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, and consequently cannot perform a find and replace across multiple files or copy text from one file to another (though it is possible to read text into the editor from a file in its working directory). 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 Windows editors, such as Notepad.^[1]

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, so many Unix novices choose to use pico. Unfortunately, pico's default mode includes automatic word-wrapping, which can cause problems when editing newline-sensitive configuration and source code files.

The GNU project has a clone of Pico called nano. Nano was developed because Pico's license is not considered to be a free software license since distribution of a modified version of the code is expressly forbidden.^[2]