What's the problem with pico?

Re:What's the problem with pico? by twrensch on Wednesday February 04, 2009 @06:52PM (#466756)

Except for basic editing tasks they aren't really comparable. Pico (or it's clone nano) are basic text editors designed to be easy for beginners to learn and use. Emacs is a text editor that is so extensible (and so extended!) that it's often compared to an operating system.

I used Emacs continuously for two years and vi on-and-off over five years. What do I use now when I need to do a bit of text-editing on a CLI...I use pico or nano. The problem is that I don't use Emacs or vi all the time, and can't remember the key bindings well enough to use them effectively. That's not a problem with pico.

So to answer your question: as long as you're doing relatively small programs (hundreds of lines and only a few files) pico should be fine. You might want to look into nano though, it looks the same but allows syntax highlighting and is more configurable.

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Re:What's the problem with pico? by PieSquared on Wednesday February 04, 2009 @07:14PM (#466794)

Sorry, I have to disagree. It's fine if you need to write a few dozen lines once a week or something, but if you code any more than that, I'd suggest learning a more advanced editor. Don't limit yourself to pico or nano. Try emacs or Vi. It's worth the few weeks to learn (and few years to learn well).

I've used both, though seem to be a bit quicker in Vi - try evim (easy vim) if you're not comfortable with jumping right in.

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