Classnotes | UNIX01 | RecentChanges | Preferences An editor that is very easy for a new-user to pick up is Pico. Pico has very simplistic key-commands that are layed out along the bottom of the screen. Pico is not considered a real editor by most UNIX system administrators as it lacks most of the features you would find in a more capable editor such as VI or Emacs.
One of the other problems Pico has is that it is distributed under a very restrictive license that does not allow modifications made to it. Thus, even for those UNIX administrators who want to use Pico but need more functionality, there is no way to fix it.
Enter Nano
Nano was a Free-Software alternative to Pico. It was written without any code from Pico, and thus, could be legally altered and modified. It has since surpased Pico in terms of functionality and is now a much more accepted and respected editor.
Nano takes much of its commands from Pico, and is thus a very simple editor to learn. However, do not take it for granted, as it has many advanced features (such as syntax highlighting and regular expression search and replace).
Now that we have learned the basics for installing an application, let's install Nano onto our system from source.
Obtain the Nano source from it's homepage above (or, if that link is not working, get it from here: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nano/ ) Unarchive it, and install it onto your system.
