There are many text editors in use in the UNIX world. Popular among these are vi, emacs and PICO. vi and emacs are powerful, but for the novice user can be very cumbersome and confusing. We have chosen to make the not so powerful but simple and easy to use PICO editor available from the login menu. If you wish to use the others, they are available from the UNIX shell prompt.

PICO was designed to be used with the PINE mailing system. They have the same 'look and feel'. You can start PICO by selecting the text editor from the 'Learn' login prompt or by the 'PICO' UNIX shell command. When you do you will be presented with a screen like this.

The menu bar at the bottom is the key to using the features of PICO. It uses control characters which are entered by holding the control key, represented by ^ (caret), down while pressing another key. For example when you see ^X, hold the ctrl key while pressing the X. As you see, there is help available via ^G. It is context sensitive where possible. The help for some of the functions is a bit sparse, so I will explain some of the useful ones here.

^X: Exit; Use this to terminate this PICO session. You will be asked if you want to save the file you are editing (if you changed it), and if so what you want to call the file.

^O: Write Out; Prompts you for a file name then writes the current text buffer to that file thus saving it.

^J: Justify; reformats (word wraps) the paragraph where the cursor is sitting. Paragraphs are delimited by blank lines or indentation. Use this when you have modified text and you want to re-align the text to look consistent. Sometimes you will edit a file which originated elsewhere which has very long lines. If they go beyond the screen width, PICO will display a $ in the right most position on the screen. ^J will reformat these lines of text wrapping the lines so all the text is visible.

^R: Read File; Prompts you for the name of a file to read. You can type in a file name, or, if you enter ^T you can browse your current directory and select a file by moving the cursor to it and pressing enter. T he content of the selected file is inserted into your editing buffer between the line the cursor in currently on and the line below.

^W: Where Is; Prompts you for a string of characters or words that you wish to search for in the current editing buffer. If the search string is found, the buffer is redisplayed with the cursor on the first character of the selected text. The search is not case sensitive.

^Y: Prev Pg; Scroll up (back) one page.

^V: Next Pg; Scroll down (forward) one page.

^K: Cut Text; Cuts the text selected via ^^ and displayed in inverse video. If there has been no text selected, the whole line the cursor is currently sitting on is cut.

^U: Uncut Text; Pastes the last cut text inserting it at the current cursor position (left edge of cursor).

^^: Mark position; (ctrl-caret) marks the current cursor position as the beginning of selected text. If text is already selected, ^^ will unselect it.

To move some text from one place to another in the document: move the cursor to the beginning of the text, ^^ to mark the beginning, move the cursor to the end of text to move, ^K to cut, move the cursor to the new location, ^U to paste the cut text in the new position.