[SunRescue] Pico Forever!!!

[Clay Mellender]

AMEN! You shouldnt need a 200 page book to learn about a simple text
editor.
Pico is the notepad of the unix world!

Clay

Chris Byrne wrote:
> 
> #!/bin/satire
> 
> Pico Forever Brothers... join with me in the clan of Pico, we shall wage
> a pico jihad against the infidels of the great satan emacs, and the lesser
> satan vi.
> 
> I disdain such baroqe  operating system replacements as emacs (no joke,
> RMS thinks that emacs could easily be turned into a complete OS, and in
> fact attempted to do so, mostly unsucsessfully for 15 years), and vi isnt
> an editor, it's a medieval torture device ported to UNIX.
> 
> Actually that's not fair, if you are a coding then vi and emacs are both
> great tools. The ability to properly view literals of special characters,
> and the very powerful text and file handling tools built in to vi are great,
> and emacs modes can do almost anything you can think of.
> 
> But for simple text editing like email or readme files, there is no need
> to load up something the size of emacs, and vi is unnecisarily complicated
> for beginners to use.
> 
> I have to think that more people have been scared away from unix by vi than
> by any other aspect of UNIX operation. How many of us managed to succesfully
> edit a file, save, and exit vi on the first try without resorting to suspending
> or killing it?
> 
> How many of us have accidentally entered a large number before a particularly
> nasty command because we forgot what mode we were in, and accidentally munged
> a document (yes I know there's an undo, but the first time I did it, I didn't)
> 
> Pico is relativley small, simple, and users can generally figure it out
> without extensive tech support. I deal with a lot of UNIX beginners when
> I teach security classes, and years of experience have taught me that subjecting
> these folks to vi or emacs is just not worth the headache for either of
> us.
> 
> I agree with the "experts" who always say that you should learn vi because
> it's on jsut about every system, IF you are a UNIX admin, or plan on using
> UNIX extensivley. But for the many people out there who only use UNIX occaisonally
> (and with great pain) I think pico is the right editor for them.
> 
> Chris Byrne
> 
> <snip>
> >It was so much more responsive than telnet.  When doing classwork
> >from home I would use a shell rather than telnet to get to a school
> >machine to that pico wouldn't lag behind my typing (I dislike VI and at
> >the time emacs wasn't installed).
> >
> >--
> >Joshua Boyd
> 
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