UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I always used pico as a text editor in Terminal or SSH. But what is the advantages/disadvantages between vim and pico?

Hi.

As a start, you can compare features for yourself of each editor (and many more) in the descriptive tables in Comparison of text editors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... cheers, drl

Pico is far easier to learn but vim is a lot more powerful and has far more functionality. I would at least learn the basics of vi/vim because you will find it on pretty much all UNIX flavors.

pico is simple and not so old it forces you through alien key-combos, but was designed exclusively as an email composer for the pine email suite so is hard to install by itself and may have an occasionally-catastrophic 80 columns limitation. Truncating or wrapping scripts would be a very bad thing.

vim is indeed everywhere, so learning at least the rudiments is useful in an emergency. It also has some very powerful regular-expression features.

But if you want an editor designed for keyboards newer than the ADM3A, I suggest pico's modern successor, nano. It's a fully independent program bundled with no junky email clients, can be told to never wrap words, has a real regex search/replace, color syntax highlighting, and some nice frills like mouse support but you can use it just like pico. It's increasingly popular in linux circles, and comes with osx by default.

Thanks guys

I don't think I've ever been on a unix box that didn't have vi installed. I can't say the same for pico. That was the winning card for me. I later realized vi was far more robust in a lot of other areas as well, but availability is still the trump card.

But its interface...

vi's a reliable last resort, but computing has moved on. The keyboard its interface was shoehorned to fit longer exists, its modern replacement does support hotkeys, and the "glass teletype" has eliminated the need to rubout characters. That would be mine. The only time I've needed to use vi was on an embedded system.