'pico' and 'joe'

pico' and 'joe'- sounds like a comic strip. Actually, they are two other text editors that I like and I think are a little easier to manage. They're like 'vi' in that you use them to create and edit non-formatted text, but they're a little more user-friendly. Using 'joe' 'joe' was created by Joseph Allen, so that's why it's called Joe. I suppose if his name had been Hrothgar Allen, it would have been called 'hroth'.

To use 'joe', you could type: joe tryjoe'.

You won't see the tildes like vi. It looks a little friendlier. The majority of joe's commands are based on the CTRL-K keys and a third key. The most important of these is CTRL-K-H which gets you 'help'. Help shows you the key combinations to use with 'joe'.

The most important thing about 'joe' is the logical concept that you can just start writing if you want. Try writing anything you want.

To save it, press CTRL-K-D. To save and quit, CTRL-K-X.

To quit without saving, CTRL-C, (without the K).

If you want to see the other features of 'joe', press CTRL-K-H, as I mentioned before.

My favorite little added feature of 'joe' is that if you edit a file again, it will save the previous file with a tilde on the end, like 'tryjoe~' That little tilde file has saved my life a couple of times. (well, maybe not my life) But it has saved me a lot of work. I've made some changes to a file and then found out that wasn't a good idea. I could always fall back on the tilde file, which is a copy of your previous edit.

'joe' is a very good option for writing those short text files that you'll need.

Using 'pico'

'pico trypico'

You'll see the commands you need in 'pico' specified at the bottom. You can just start writing anything you want.

To save the file, press CTRL-o. To save and quit or to just quit, press CTRL-x

Pico will always ask you if you want to do what you're doing. That's good. Questions like that will keep you from sending a file into non-existence without wanting to. All the other commands you'll need are at the bottom of the page.

Well, this is our little overview of the main text editors available for Linux. In our next lesson, we're going to need to use one in order to make our work in Linux a little bit safer and easier.

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