Family: TinyEditorFamily? |
Family: TinyEditors |
PIne message COmposition editor
Author: Mike Seibel, Steve Hubert Homepage: http://www.washington.edu/pine/ Family: TinyEditorFamily? 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:
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.