[Alpine-info] Pico

[Joshua Miller]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 3:57 PM, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk at gmail.com>wrote:


> [using xubuntu 10.04] - the question is regarding the use of Pico for

> text 'word' editing rather than programming lines.

>

> I hope it's alright to ask a quick question about Pico on here. It's

> quite basic.

>

> Whilst using Alpine having got used to Pico i've decided to use it for

> editing. Until now i've been using Leafpad for basic editing. It seems

> the graphical editors automatically wordwrap any file if the option

> wordwrap is ticked in Options > wordrap.

>

> In Pico if one does ^J and saves the file the wordwrap is set next

> time the file is opened. If i use Leafpad and uncheck the wordrap

> option the opened file is wordwrapped.

>

> So how is the text file altered by Pico [i've compared with nano and

> so it appears this is the case with most text editors]. I was

> wondering if there was an option for opening all files with wordwrap

> set like there is with nano [according to man pico there isn't unless

> i missed it!].

>

>

I use vim almost exclusively, so take my advice with a grain of salt :-)

nano --softwrap <file>
this will do a softwrap, and I think it's what you're talking about.

The ^J in pico/nano performs a hard wrap / justification, entering new lines
at the "--fill" width (defaults to -8 in nano, which is 8 characters before
the max width of your current terminal... you can set it to "80" to fix it
at that width).

I don't know of an option to do the ^J on the file by default at startup.
And I don't know of any --softwrap option for pico (though I imagine it has
to have something like that in the code somewhere... none of the help
options seem to do the trick)

pico, as it ships with alpine, is supposed to recognize the ~/.nanorc files.
For some reason, my copy of nano doesn't even appear to listen to that file
(set softwrap didn't do anything for me, and I had to use the command line
option --softwrap).

HTH
--
Josh I.
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