January 13, 2004 Views (5,561) /  Comments (1) /  Trackback (0) / Digg/Share

Licensing issues between Pine and RedHat have led to the disapperance of PINE from Linux distributions on most web hosts, which in turns means the vanishing of the friendly text editor called “Pico”. The option my webhost provides me now is something called “nano” (click here for a review from Linuxgazette).

Nano, however, has a bunch of bugs — the most criminal of them being one where newlines appear at will in the file you are editing, the delete and backspace and meta keys cease to work, the cursor mark doesn’t proceed to the new line etc. It’s a bizarre experience. And my webhost was at his wit’s end.

I do miss Pico, and no, I wouldn’t learn VI or EMACS if I had to do it to save my life. So with all my digging and searching, I’ve managed to stumble upon a work-around to Nano instead.

Just execute the following in your shell environment (e.g., through .bashrc for bash, or .cshrc for tsch)

If it is not in the auto sourced files, then just “source” this file on the shell, and your “pico ” should work again, as usual. Click here for the command line options of nano.

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