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Also, since the person who posted this was too stupid to be able to actually link to the nano web site, here it is.

Systemd vs init: It's the new emacs vs vi debate for the 21st century. :P

Vote third party!

nano implements some features that Pico lacks, including colored text, regular expression search and replace, smooth scrolling, multiple buffers, rebindable key support, and (experimental) undoing and redoing of edit changes.

I poked around nano's website and it seems pretty capable.
It sounds like nano does everything you need, so there is no reason to learn about other editors.
I have fond memories of pine and pico; maybe I will look at nano one of these days.

fwiw, I find some powertools worth learning to use well even if they have a non-easy learning curve (sed comes to mind). This also applies to text editors; they're just tools.
As for "1975 wants vi back", I actually get a lot of mileage from vim which is a bit closer to nano's era.
nano: born 1999 as TIP, inspired by pico.
(btw, the last item on the nano news page is from 2009: "Now on Twitter and Facebook and Happy 10th Birthday nano". Is nano under active development these days?)
vim:born 1988, released 1991 (initially for amiga, much more widespread now), inspired by vi (note I do feel sorry for anyone stuck using "classic vi" in the same way I'd feel sorry for anyone stuck with edlin).
(side note: vi-style learning curve sucks. My first two weeks were Painful, but now that I have some skill (muscle memory) with the keys I find it very effective. Kind of like how touch-typing is harder to learn than "hunt & peck" but it is still well worthwhile to learn how to touch-type; it pays dividends. Most of vi-style power (for me) comes from the fast navigation+editing commands that are tied to a rather terse (and admittedly cryptic) "shorthand" language of key combinations... I remember actually being surprised at how clunky arrow key + mouse navigation felt when I first used conventional editors after driving vi-style for a while.)
One of the things I like about having learned Vim is it will be available pretty much wherever I might need to work: here are some of the targets from from wikipedia's vim page (* indicates ports I have used):

AmigaOS (the initial target platform), DOS, Microsoft Windows 95/*98/Me/*NT/*2000/*XP/*Server 2003/*Vista/*Server 2008/*7, IBM OS/2 and OS/390, OpenVMS, QNX, *Unix, *Linux, BSD, and Mac OS. Also, Vim is shipped with every copy of Apple Mac OS X. Independent ports of Vim are available both for Android and iOS.

(I've also found vim for aix; useful if one needs to spend time there.) Note that vim seems pretty consistently fully featured on the various platforms I've used it on (*'s above).
By comparison, nano seems pretty content to excel in linux distributions (redhat & debian).
And maybe, possibly, kind of sort of windows: from the nano faq, 3.9 How about in Win32

We're still working on documentation for enabling synax highlighting on Win32; please bear with us. Note that the nano.rc file must remain Unix formatted in order for nano to understand it. In other words, you should use probably only use nano to edit its config file. Other programs like Wordpad and Notepad will either convert the file to DOS format when saving, and the latter does not even properly read Unix-formatted files to begin with.

*shrug* I'm glad nano is working for you in the land of the modern linux desktop.

As for emacs: I sincerely believe that emacs users enjoy the capabilities they find; I may find a need for something emacs does well these days. I've never heard anyone say "Yeah,

nano implements some features that Pico lacks, including colored text, regular expression search and replace, smooth scrolling, multiple buffers, rebindable key support, and (experimental) undoing and redoing of edit changes.

I poked around nano's website and it seems pretty capable.
It sounds like nano does everything you need, so there is no reason to learn about other editors.
I have fond memories of pine and pico; maybe I will look at nano one of these days.

fwiw, I find some powertools worth learning to use well even if they have a non-easy learning curve (sed comes to mind). This also applies to text editors; they're just tools.
As for "1975 wants vi back", I actually get a lot of mileage from vim which is a bit closer to nano's era.
nano: born 1999 as TIP, inspired by pico.
(btw, the last item on the nano news page is from 2009: "Now on Twitter and Facebook and Happy 10th Birthday nano". Is nano under active development these days?)
vim:born 1988, released 1991 (initially for amiga, much more widespread now), inspired by vi (note I do feel sorry for anyone stuck using "classic vi" in the same way I'd feel sorry for anyone stuck with edlin).
(side note: vi-style learning curve sucks. My first two weeks were Painful, but now that I have some skill (muscle memory) with the keys I find it very effective. Kind of like how touch-typing is harder to learn than "hunt & peck" but it is still well worthwhile to learn how to touch-type; it pays dividends. Most of vi-style power (for me) comes from the fast navigation+editing commands that are tied to a rather terse (and admittedly cryptic) "shorthand" language of key combinations... I remember actually being surprised at how clunky arrow key + mouse navigation felt when I first used conventional editors after driving vi-style for a while.)
One of the things I like about having learned Vim is it will be available pretty much wherever I might need to work: here are some of the targets from from wikipedia's vim page (* indicates ports I have used):

AmigaOS (the initial target platform), DOS, Microsoft Windows 95/*98/Me/*NT/*2000/*XP/*Server 2003/*Vista/*Server 2008/*7, IBM OS/2 and OS/390, OpenVMS, QNX, *Unix, *Linux, BSD, and Mac OS. Also, Vim is shipped with every copy of Apple Mac OS X. Independent ports of Vim are available both for Android and iOS.

(I've also found vim for aix; useful if one needs to spend time there.) Note that vim seems pretty consistently fully featured on the various platforms I've used it on (*'s above).
By comparison, nano seems pretty content to excel in linux distributions (redhat & debian).
And maybe, possibly, kind of sort of windows: from the nano faq, 3.9 How about in Win32

We're still working on documentation for enabling synax highlighting on Win32; please bear with us. Note that the nano.rc file must remain Unix formatted in order for nano to understand it. In other words, you should use probably only use nano to edit its config file. Other programs like Wordpad and Notepad will either convert the file to DOS format when saving, and the latter does not even properly read Unix-formatted files to begin with.

*shrug* I'm glad nano is working for you in the land of the modern linux desktop.

As for emacs: I sincerely believe that emacs users enjoy the capabilities they find; I may find a need for something emacs does well these days. I've never heard anyone say "Yeah,

How well does OpenOffice.org do this?

OpenOffice doesn't do TeX-style markup, since the sole reason for OpenOffice existing is to feel familiar for users of Microsoft Office (pre 2007), and since Word doesn't do it (yet) then neither can OOo.

If you don't care about Microsoft Office then you're free to use anything. I use LyX ( http://www.lyx.org/ ), a GUI word processor which outputs to TeX, when I'm doing large projects or anything scientific. I use Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ) for creating quick throwaway documents, and I use leafpad (GUI, http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad ) and Nano (commandline, http://www.nano-editor.org/ ) for writing down anything that doesn't need any formatting.

1) Just learn VI. You won't regret it
2) Use Nano

Try this, if you have nano installed:

$ nano then press: x (to type a letter x), ctrl+x (to exit), y (yes you want to save), zzy (the filename to save it as)

And enjoy the show. I don't know if this is specific to Nano, or if it was present in Pico. Note that it doesn't save the file.

Particularly since Nano has a better license and more features.

Can't decide between the complexity of emacs and the counterintuitiveness of vi? Try GNU nano! Now with built-in Unicode support!

I reluctantly got into vi back in the early 1990s, after being spoilt by the wonderful text editors available on VAX/VMS. Then I promptly forgot all about it -- never even had a fling with ELVIS on MS-DOS -- until discovering Linux sometime in 1999 or 2000. My favourite console editor used to be AEE; then I discovered pine, and hence pico. Now I can't live without nano. There's even a vi command built into BusyBox.

No no, seriously though, I couldn't resist, but what I couldn't resist was a joke, not a war.

How is this different?
From the nano download page:
nano-1.2.5 .zip WinNT/9x binary, .zip format.

I think Nano would be a better fit for Damn Small Linux, wouldn't it?

WordPad is not a word processor; it is merely a fairly primitive text editor which happens to support proportional fonts. It does not {at least, not the last time I checked} include a spelling checker, nor a style manager. Even nano can check your spelling! Admittedly, it uses an external program for this; but that's just how things are done in the unix world.

I think it says something about Microsoft's target audience that they value the ability to change fonts in a document more highly than the ability to have the computer check and correct your spelling.

I don't think nano needs to be desalinized; it's pretty good the way it is. It could use syntax highlighting though...

There's always pico, nano, Diakonos, gedit, ... But frankly I love using vi[m] :)

Your post looks like flamebait, but still - Vim is popular exactly because it works that way. Customizable (most power users have their own hand-crafted configs), light, console-based (great in shells and when your system is screwed up) and does a lot of stuff really fast if you know how to use it. I usually use vim for editing configs or when I'm too lazy to run Kate or Gedit. For editing text files, source code etc. I usually use Kate. If you don't like Vim because of its interface, use another editor, perhaps nano. Vim's interface is the reason that makes it popular.

Using my superior pattern recognition skills I've deduced that a iPod Pico will be forthcomming.

Apple has already bypassed the arcanely licensed pico by releasing the more modern and free nano. As you know, several years ago Apple introduced emacs. It is clear Apple's next product will be vi based.

Pico rules!

Pico is not free software. See "The license of PINE" at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Nano is free software.

nano rocks! The smaller your editor, the bigger your penis! Text editors want to be minimalist!

Real men use Nano!

"VI vs. Emacs on the other hand... Let's just say some debates never go out of style."

neither... they're both ridiculously old fashioned... I much prefer nano, small footprint and gets the job of editing text files done with no fuss.

For IRC, I use irssi. It's neat, small, fast, and does what I need it to. Also, I haven't had the need to change any of its stock options yet - I like it the way it is. Other candidates are BitchX (annoying autoaway etc.), ircII (too much configuring, maybe?), or CenterICQ (don't like the interface for IRC).

CenterICQ is my app of choice for IM. It's quirky sometimes, and once segfaulted, but other than that, I have had 0 problems with it. Also, it supports a variety of protocols.

For web-browsing, I use links. I've tried lynx and w3m, but links just "does it" I guess :). It's got support for more stuff. Also, I find the -g option nice, something the other two don't have IIRC.

I've tried Emacs, Pico, Nano, ed, etc. etc. etc., but so far, nothing has replaced my addiction to Vim. Maybe I'm a masochist, I don't know.

When I'm at home in console mode, I usually use Alt+Fx to switch between different apps, and use screen to keep irssi and centericq running. When over ssh, I use screen. Sometimes, I run out of VTs, so I use screen to group things inside the VTs. When in X, I just keep things in separate rxvt windows.

For entertainment, I have either NetHack, fortune -o, or bash.org (aww shit, slashdotted them, they're down enough as it is!) in links. :)

-- Chris

After several attempts to live solely on the console, here are the best apps I've found:

Links: a superior web browser alternative to Lynx that formats things correctly on your screen.

Mutt and Pine: Two great email clients that allow you to work much more quickly than with any graphical client.

Nano: My favorite text editor. I refuse to feel guilty that it's easy to use!

Micq: a very nice ICQ client that works much better than the various AIM console clients that are out there.

Finally, last, and well yes, basically least, Seatris: This is the best -- the best! -- of all the console tetris games. It takes me back to wasting hours in the various UC Santa Cruz computer labs.

Um, Go Banana Slugs! Go Stevenson College! I think that takes care of this year's quota of school spirit.

All of these run on Windows only but there are a lot of Unix/Linux eds that have Win32 ports. There are other tools (IDEs and so on) there as well. I found that site while looking for a Windows version of PICO - I ended up using nano instead, which I didn't know existed (old Unix head that I am). Nano runs great on a Windows console, BTW.

Personally I would like to see someone come up with a list or a wiki of all free/libre editors for *nix/*BSD. There are a few lists around, but none are very comprehensive.

Bah!

The only nano I'm okay with is the editor that real men use :-p

ONLY my editor is tiny, mind you!

## quote
I can't stand vi, and there really isn't a simple console (text-mode) editor geared for DOS/Windows users available on Linux.
## end

I am sure you will get a hundred replies pointing you to simple editors for linux. But I would just like to point out my favorite simple text editor nano

It is actually becoming pretty standard on linux distributions (gentoo and debian)

It is similar to the old DOS edit and is a clone of a text editor called pico.

pico rules...

there you go

Although I use nano now since it is available seperately from Pine and is released under the GPL.

Probably. The rest of them switched to nano.

Or, considering the non-GPL license for pico and pine nano, a pico clone

BZZZT WRONG! pico for both.

GNU Nano looks like a gnu rip-off^Wversion of pico to me.

nano is smaller than pico. Hah!

Pico is open, but not Free.

Try GNU Nano instead.

Just link nano to pico and never look back!

-Peter

Hmmm...ya know ... my Gentoo box has nano technlogy, but really, I prefer vim myself.

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

Doesn't support Maildir in the main code, only thru third-party patches, and pine guys rejects to add Maildir support to the code.

Have you ever noticed that the development of Pine is completely architected and funded by students and faculty of wash.edu? They don't run Maildir on their servers, so why should they even invest time and money in developing support for something they can't test, use, or deploy internally? Pine is used on their internal mail system, and it uses mbox.

If you want Maildir, don't use Pine. If you want the less-capable mail reader, use mutt. Just because mutt supports Maildir does not make it better.

2. Is not GPL

Pine is free. You can make as many patches and additions as you want to it, you just can't redistribute it as "Pine". If you want a GPL clone of Pine (and one that looks and acts IDENTICAL to Pine), you should be using Mana with Nano the editor, both are GPL'd and if you want, encourage their development to suit your needs. If not, you have absolutely no reason to be complaining.

Anything else? I didn't think so.

But I think the best reason to love Pine has to be... PICO!

Nano-editor

Cheers,
Jonathan

Well, here's a working version of the link above. Nano is GPL, it has the same interface as Pico, and it has a bunch of cool features like multi-buffer support, syntax coloring, and smooth scrolling. (Make sure to get the 1.1.12 "unstable" version.)

I love pico. I just installed a Debian box, however, and Pine doesn't seem to fit the licensing for Debian, so I installed nano. It's very similar to pico, without the security problems of pine.

It's a FAQ. You can't disable it (without going into pico emulation mode), but you can cancel it.

A little annoyance in comparison to all the other benefits.

/me chuckles as half the slashdot readership runs away at someone admitting that he likes pico :)

I like pico too, i just couldn't use it as a programmers editor. You may want to try nano, a pico clone (Debian licensing issues) with some major improvements like regex search/replace, i think syntax highlighting also.

And what program besides a text editor makes a 30k file?

What program besides a text editor is useful for writing a sermon?

My absolute favorite programming IDE ever was Borland Turbo Pascal 7.0; therefore, I'm a sucker for any editor written in TurboVision, like RHIDE or SetEdit.

DOS Edit is still pretty decent in the console; on the GUI side, NoteTab is a notepad replacement on steroids (the "Light" version is free).

If you download Cygwin, you can compile almost any UNIX-y text editor you want, including my favorite--nano.

And if all else fails, Ask Google!

Also the the IBM EE (Easy Editor) will give you terminal braindamage (pun intended). Warez MS EDIT.COM and avoid at all costs.

If you get edit.com, don't get the edit.com from DOS 5 or 6, as that requires QBasic, can only have one file open, can't edit binary files, and can only edit up to a 64 KB file. You want edit.com from Windows 95, 98, or ME.

If you don't want to pirate anything, you can get DJGPP, which is a port of the GNU system to PC DOS platforms (MS-DOS, DR DOS, FreeDOS) with an i386-series CPU. It includes a port of GNU Emacs. And if you don't like Emacs, there's always GNU Nano, a clone of Pico that has also been ported to PC DOS, or SETEDIT, a free clone of the Borland editor for DOS.

OK, this is not flamebait, nor am I trolling:
An easy to use editor, which I use daily, is a Pico clone, which is open-sourced. It's called Nano, Linkage here (http://www.nano-editor.org). It operates as simply as Pine, and it has a smaller footprint than Pico. (Yes, I do mean it's simplicity is like Pine, and Pico is the Pine editor, if you did not know.) Try NANO!!! Get the source, and do ./configure, make, make install. Easy!

Pine is developed with features which the students at WSU find useful or need. Since WSU doesn't use maildir, pine will not have that feature.

Remember, pine development is funded by the students themselves, out of pocket, not from any institution or development company. There are third-party patches to pine that do maildir, but pine itself will not ever include that capability until the university itself decides to switch over to using maildir.

If you need a free, GPL'd pine clone with that capability, use MANA with nano instead.

I've been a pine user for nearly a decade (or howver long it's been around), and have intermittently tried going to mutt. As a user who gets a very high volume of email, pine has a much more advanced search/zoom/sort feature than mutt (currently, as of August/2001) has. I've customized mutt to the n'th degree with every single pine key binding I use, and still I miss the ability to quickly search, zoom, and sort my messages. Mutt just can't seem to do that. I've posted on the list, heard a ton of people talking about folder hooks which launch a perl script to parse the maildir and throw some nasty regexes at it. No thanks.

Also, why does the folder browser let me walk my entire file system? And additionally, from that folder view, allow me to edit and delete files, even shared and static libraries? This is bad. Pine doesn't let you do this, and neither should mutt. Yes, I could go in there and hack the source to forbid this, but once again, pine wins.

Last I knew, you couldn't do imap and pop mailboxen simultaneously in the same folder or within the same session with mutt. Pine does this transparently. Also, is there a way to do nntp within mutt without having to install imapd and a local news cache? Again, pine wins.

There are probably a dozen more things pine does in a superior fashion that mutt does not at this point. Until it matures to match pine and work and function in the way that I use pine for, mutt (for me), is still inferior.

Oh, and your comment about pine being open source, is wrong. Pine certainly is open source. It is free, you can give it away, and it follows the OSD, the only restriction is that you distribute the original pine source + any patches you make, not redistribute the sources pre-modified. Please go familiarize yourself with the Open Source Definition before posting this incorrect information in the future.

Until mutt can match pine for me, pine is always going to find a warm place on my desktop. Also, you really should look into MANA if you want a free, GPL'd pine clone replacement. Couple this with nano and you already have a capable replacement environment that would surpass mutt in capabilities.

Let's also not forget that pine is enhanced with features that the students at Washington State University find useful. The development of those new features is funded by those students, out of pocket. Only the things they need get put in. A perfect example is maildir. Since wash.edu doesn't use maildir, why does pine need to support it?

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