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= Pico and Nano =

== A bit of history ==
Pico was developed at the University of Washington as the text editor for their terminal-based email client called Pine. It's designed to be a nice, basic editor that anyone regardless of computer skill can use. Unfortunately the strange licensing terms dictated by UW (which forbids redistributing binaries built from anything but the official UW source) have put a lot of people off. Luckily the [[http://www.fsf.org/|Free Software Foundation]]'s [[http://www.gnu.org/|GNU]] project has written a clone called Nano, which Apple, Debian Linux, and Red``Hat Linux (among others) now provide as an alternative.

== How to use Pico and Nano ==
To start the program, simply type {{{pico}}} or {{{nano}}} on the Unix command line. You may find that when you type {{{pico}}} you get Nano instead. This is fine; it's just so people who are used to using Pico don't have to change what they're used to doing.

At the bottom of the screen are two rows that display commonly used commands and their key sequences. Following Unix convention, the {{{Control}}} key is represented with a carat (e.g. {{{^X}}} means hold down the {{{Control}}} key and hit the {{{x}}} key). If you read the help ({{{^G}}}) you will see all the possible commands. Nano has a number of extensions, most of which are activated using the {{{Meta}}} key instead of {{{Control}}}. Very few keyboards out there have a {{{Meta}}} key anymore, so usually {{{Alt}}} or {{{Esc}}} stand in, depending on the operating system. On MacOS X, use {{{Esc}}} for {{{Meta}}} in Nano.