[Alpine-info] Pico

[James Freer]

Thank you all for your replies.

Why use Pico instead of Nano?

Fair point - i'm an old fogey who did an engineering degree in the 80s
and used wordstar... still think their keybindings were the best for
typing. The wordstar clones Joe and e3 are ok but not in places so i'd
rather not use them. Perhaps i'm just a fussy so-and-so i like things
to work. To some extent i've gone over the graphical editors and quite
happy with Leafpad (particularly for fast loading uses like ItsAllText
in browser to post on forums) and gedit for more complicated things.
These of course wordwrap straight away.

Nano is supposed to be the #1 console editor after Vim and emacs [with
many linux distros]. I wasn't impressed at all by vim and emacs for
editing word text (compared with programmers code which is what they
were intended for primarily). I may be wrong on that point but that's
as i see it. With nano if you have your browser open and press Meta
key with left arrow or right arrow - the browser will close which i
discovered by accident as this is a common way of moving a word in
almost any graphical editor or word processor. M-? should take you to
last line (it does) but the alternative keystroke M-\ opens up the
search same with M-/. M-} indent and M-{ unindent - umm no. ^-space
and M-space excellent work as intended. Perhaps i'd be more at home
with Jove or mg which i'll have a look at and see how they work in
Alpine as the editor. For word text editing i just want something
simple which is rather different to your requirements in programming -
but i'm old fashioned i don't like glitches and like simplicity.

As i've started using alpine (although i've still got one or two
things to sort out on configuring as i'd like it) - thought i'd see
how i found Pico for doing text editing as i'm using it in Alpine.
Eduardo has sorted me out on this minor thing which i'm grateful for.
With text email no mouse speeds up editing - i've found ^k being my
favourite keystroke for all those signatures and trailers you have to
delete before replying... bottom posting seems to becoming the
standard.

thanks
james