[SunRescue] Pico Forever!!!

[Chris Byrne]

#!/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