Pico

HomePage | RecentChanges | EditorIndex | TextEditorFamilies | Preferences

 PIne message COmposition editor

 Author:   Mike Seibel, Steve Hubert
 Homepage: http://www.washington.edu/pine/ 
 Family:   TinyEditors
 Platform: Unix (NetBSD, Solaris), Linux, DOS, Windows, Amiga, Mac OS/X, OS/2, VMS
 License:  Open source

Pico is part of the Pine email package and was designed to be easy to learn (see EasyVsPowerful). "Pico" stands for PIne message COmposition editor. Pine's popularity means that Pico can be found on most Unix systems; Pine is also available for MS Windows (see CrossPlatformStrategy, TinyEditors)

Pico is free, but it has a license restriction that prevents it from being distributed with Debian Linux. For this reason, there is a free clone of Pico called Nano, which has some additional features. Any Unix system that doesn't have Pico is likely to have Nano.

Pico is not primarily a stand-alone editor, like most of the other editors in this wiki. However, it's mentioned because many people use Pine as their mail client under Unix, thus they use Pico to compose messages. If you just want an editor that works and looks like Pico, but you want it to install separately, an alternative is a clone called Nano. (For the curious, note that scientifically pico is one-trillionth and nano is one-billionth.)

Download Pine emailer packages with Pico: ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/

Last version for DOS 16-bit is in PC-Pine 3.96 packages: ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/old/PC-PINE-3.96/

32-bit standalone DOS version: ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pc/dos/djgpp/current/v2apps/pico396b.zip

 Screenshot:


Comments:

These days, I'd recommend something a little more windows-like such as SetEdit, which looks a heck of a lot like the text editor in the DOS window.


Assuming you can deal with SetEdit's insistance on running full screen, regardless of how you set it up in Windows...
HomePage | RecentChanges | EditorIndex | TextEditorFamilies | Preferences
Edit text of this page | View other revisions
Last edited November 12, 2008 11:06 am (diff)
Search: