This is a Linux type issue, so if you use Windows you need not read. I love having simple text editors. Who likes knowing how to exit out of VI or how to get the menus to work on emacs? And who has even heard of, let alone used, ee?

I grew up on PICO. Pico comes with most basic installations of Linux because it’s packaged with PINE (the email client). Pico gets the job done whenever I’ve needed it. I like using EE more, but it’s also harder to find on every system (FreeBSD is great). Enough buzz words? OK, on to the meat of the article.

Since no one likes to install extra software (you need to install PINE in order to get PICO on a system), I found a program called NANO. Here’s the simple steps to get it to install:

Oh, be warned that it requires at least a simple C+ compiler (oops).

Open up a terminal session.
type “wget http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v1.2/nano-1.2.5.tar.gz” without the quotes
cd to the directory you downloaded the tar.gz to.
type “gtar xvvzf nano-1.2.5.tar.gz” without the quotes.
cd into the nano-1.2.5 directory.
type “./configure” without the quotes – this will tell you if there are any problems before compiling the program.
type “make install” without the quotes – this will actually install the required files into sbin and usr directories.
after the installation is finished, you can type “nano” or “nano {filename}” and run this very simple text editor.