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What's the problem with pico?

2 points by geuis ↗ HN
This is just a request to inform my brain from people who know better. What's wrong with using pico for editing? Everyone and their hacker grandmother talks about the advantages of emacs. I've never actually used it so I have nothing negative to say. I've just used pico for my command line editing because I've found it works pretty well and I like the editing commands. Why emacs over pico?

7 comments

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alnayyir
Iuno. I use nano/pico on most unixy systems I'm on.

Vi and Emacs just slow me down, and I've tried/used both more than you might think.

Frankly, I'm just a lot faster at moving text around in a graphical environment. I prefer terminals for other things.

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twrensch
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.

PieSquared
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.

cperciva
This is fairly typical of holy wars: Once a holy war has become entrenched, those of us who are atheists tend to get ignored by both sides because we're not "the enemy".

Personally, I use nano when I need to edit files from a text console (and kwrite when I'm in front of my usual KDE desktop and am editing local files). I've never seen any point to learning either emacs or vi.

geuis
I'll check out nano and play with emacs. Everyone's usage scenarios are pretty much what I do, which is basic text editing. Thanks!
weaksauce
For basic text editing vi(and vim) are pretty much identical to any other basic text editor. For someone to get started with vi all they need to know is that pressing i gets you into insert mode which is like every other text editor. You can move around with the arrow keys and press escape to stop editing. To write the file press esc and type :wq "write" and "quit." or :q! if you want to quit without saving.

If you are using vim I should also point out that pressing escape and then press u to undo changes. Repeat as many times as you need. Ctrl+r will redo. (I believe vi only lets you undo one change and no redo. Correct me if I am wrong.)

This editor is on all nix systems and is quite easy to use in the basic capacity. But to each their own. I have not tried emacs lately so I cannot attest to that editor.