Pico text editor has turned 33. It may seem a little archaic but it can be handy and is quick and easy to use
Terminal
Developer Apple Inc
Difficulty
Time needed
10
Happy 33rd birthday Pico text editor! It was created at Washington University in 1989. It’s been around for so long, yet hardly anyone knows it exists. It is bundled with the Mac and is a little-known utility included in Monterey.
Pico includes state-of-the-art features and functions, for 1989 that is. Its interface is archaic for a 2022 operating system, but if you don’t mind learning a few keyboard shortcuts, it is still usable. When you are at the Terminal and need to view or edit a text file, use Pico. It is quick and easy to use once you get to know it. Another useful feature is that it strips out formatting, leaving plain text.
Step-by-step Open, edit and save text files
1 Open Pico
Launch the Terminal app and type ‘pico’ at the command prompt to run the app. This opens a blank document. At the bottom of the window are keyboard shortcuts.
2 Browse the disk
Press ctrl+R to open a file on disk, but which one? Press ctrl+T to browse the disk. Use the arrow keys and enter to navigate your folders and select a file for editing.
3 Paste in text
Instead of opening a file on disk, you might want to create one from scratch. Press cmd+V to paste text from the clipboard, such as text copied from the web in Safari.
4 Edit the text
Pico is a text editor, so use the arrow keys to move the cursor and enter text, create new lines, join them and so on. Leave a blank line to create paragraphs in the text.
5 Save the file
Press ctrl+O to save the document as a plain text file. Type in a filename like ~/ CodeSnippet.tx
