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Subject:pico From:scot <scot -at- HCI -dot- COM -dot- AU> Date:Thu, 22 Jun 1995 10:09:53 +1000
> I just wanted to mention, for anyone subscribed to techwr-l by way of a
> UNIX shell account, a lovely little editor called PICO. I now use it on a
> daily basis, both as part of a good-if-still-in-progress mail-reader
> called PINE, and as my one-and-only stand-alone text editor.
> PICO is absolutely marvelous -- the user interface is exTREMEly well
> designed, and it's top-of-the-heap with respect to manipulating text
> fragments in a UNIX environment. It makes "vi" look the the horrible,
> ungainly beast that it is. In point of fact, I am using PICO to compose
> this message.
I would qualify this to say ... PICO is fine for news & mail, and I also use
it for authoring web pages in-place on the server (mostly because its
intelligent line wrapping and para reformatting makes it better at producing
human-readable html source), but I'd never, ever use it for system
administration type activities or writing shell scripts (which of course is
not applicable to everyone here).
However if I need to do more complex things like search-and-replace on html
files and so on I always resort to vi, which in this regard is much more
powerful than pico. You will never go wrong learning at least the basics of
vi (or emacs if you're into that sort of thing) - every *nix system has a
vi. Take the time and learn how to use it, that's knowledge that will always
serve you well (once learnt, you will find out eventually why you need vi if
you're writing documents on *ix systems).
ciao, scot
BTW, does anyone else out there find that marking html directly into a text
file the easiest way to make web pages? Am I just a mutant? I find that all
these Word based program macros only get in my way (particularly having to
take the file from dos to unix and back again to do it), although I'm no
purist when it comes to these sorts of things.
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HCI Consulting Better Communications Better Management.
(61-2)247-3437 (ph) http://www.hci.com.au/management/
(61-2)247-5160 (fax) GPO Box 4846 Sydney NSW 2001 Australia
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The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of HCI
Consulting, its management, its employees, or even myself.
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