You can start and dabble with pico using the following steps. Notice that the pico interface is intuitive and easy to navigate in, as shown in Figure 4.4.
1. | pico To begin, type pico at the shell prompt. The program starts up and you’ll see something like Figure 4.4, with the text area up at the top of the window and the command hints down at the bottom. If you know the name of the file you want to edit, type pico at the shell prompt followed by the path and name of the file you want to edit (hairyspiders, for example). |
2. | hairyspiders Go ahead. Type in something—anything— just to try it out.
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✓ Tips
Start pico with the -w option (e.g., pico-w filename) to disable word wrapping. You’ll find this particularly useful when editing configuration files, as covered in Chapter 8.
Throughout pico, you’ll see ^C, ^J, and dozens of other ^something characters hanging out in the menu at the bottom. The ^ stands for Ctrl, so ^C is ,^J is , and so on.