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Grex Info Item 18: Pico text editor now available [linked]
Entered by remmers on Wed Dec 30 18:25:30 UTC 1992:

I've installed 'pico', the full-screen text editor that's part of the
'pine' mail system.  To run it as a standalone text editor, type 'pico
filename' at a unix shell prompt or '!pico filename' at a Picospan prompt. 
To make it your default Picospan editor, type 'define editor pico' at a
Picospan prompt (or put that line in your .cfonce file to make the change
permanent). 

It's a very bare-bones text editor, with nowhere near the functionality of
vi, emacs, or jove, and is intended mainly as a simple, easy-to-learn
editor for creating short texts such as email messages or conference
responses.  There's a 2-line menu of the major commands on the screen at all
times, and typing control-G gets you on-line help.  Features include
word wrap, spell checking, and paragraph justification.  Do 'man pico'
for more info.

To use 'pico', you need a termcap.  If you already have one that works for
vi, jove, or full-screen games like nethack, it should also work for pico.
There's a reasonable chance that your arrow keys will work for moving the
cursor.  (If not, use ^b for backward movement, ^f for forward, ^p for
previous line, and ^n for next line.)

Use this item for questions & comments about pico.

(Note:  There's no connection between pico and picospan except for name
similarity.)

6 responses total.

#1 of 6 by cwb on Wed Dec 30 19:27:06 1992:

        Ok, I'm giving pico a test run here.  If this actually works, I'll
have found a solution to my word wrap problem.  It appears to wrap, but
does odd things to my typing voice, i.e keyboard echo for my speech
program.  But it does appear to work.
     The spell checker works quite well for me.  Huzzah!

#2 of 6 by davel on Thu Dec 31 01:14:10 1992:

Nice, John.  Thanks.

#3 of 6 by kentn on Thu Dec 31 06:13:14 1992:

Thanks, John.  I grabbed pico from someplace and put it on the Unix
system where I work.  It's great, as has been mentioned, for short editing
jobs.  I've found vi more useful for some things, but pico will do the
job for the majority of what I do.

#4 of 6 by karol on Fri May 20 00:12:02 1994:

I'm sorry, but how do I end.  I start an e-mail message, but can't get it 
to send anything.

#5 of 6 by davel on Fri May 20 02:27:15 1994:

Karol, what are you using?  This will depend on your mailer and probably on
your editor.

If you're just using mail (followed by the recipient's username) from within
Picospan, and if you don't have an editor set up, then you would terminate
with a line containing a period and nothing else, or with a control-D (or
your end-of-file character).

If you have an editor defined, your mail program may put you in it to
compose your message.  In this case, the normal exit-with-save should
cause the message to be sent, possibly after some more questions from your
mailer.

#6 of 6 by popcorn on Fri May 20 04:19:23 1994:

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