William Morder composed on 2018-02-20 11:58 (UTC-0800):
If I recall correctly, pico was originally the editor for the pine mailer, and nano was a clone of it created to avoid licensing issues. And yes, for the casual user who doesn't intend to immerse him- or herself in a command-line editor, nano is superior to either vi or emacs.
Regarding editors
If you have not heard of, there is "ne", which is my favorite command line editor - unfortunately is not installed by default in debian and is not available on other distros. It is however impressive. I can recommend
Thanks much, will check that out.
Not counting sed and email, the editors I use 99.8%+ of my time on Linux are those built into OFMs, which for me are Midnight Commander and FileCommander/L. ~.01% or less of the time that no OFM is or can be made available, I use Nano. Usually if MC isn't installed I try installing it first before trying any fallback. MC in Konsole is one of the bits that hooked me on KDE back around the turn of the century.