Basic operations
Pico displays a menu bar of commonly used commands at the bottom of the screen. Pico accepts commands from your keyboard but not from your mouse. The following are some of Pico’s basic operations:
- Inserting text: To insert text into your Pico editing screen at the cursor, just begin typing. Pico inserts the text to the left of the cursor, moving any existing text along to the right. Each time the cursor reaches the end of a line, Pico’s word wrap feature automatically moves it to the beginning of the next line. (Also see ”Justifying text”.)
- Cursor movement: To move the cursor, use the arrow keys or use the following commands:
Ctrl-f
Moves the cursor forward one character Note: See the Command overview for more cursor movement commands.
- Deleting text: To delete the character to the left of the cursor, press
Backspace
,Delete
, orCtrl-h
. To delete the character highlighted by the cursor, pressCtrl-d
. To delete the current line, pressCtrl-k
. - Saving your work: To save your edited file to disk, press
Ctrl-o
. Pico displays the current filename. (To save the file under a different name, delete the filename that Pico displays and type a new one.) PressEnter
. - Exiting Pico: To exit Pico, press
Ctrl-x
. If you made any changes since the last save, Pico will ask whether or not to save them. Typey
(for yes) orn
(for no). If you typey
, Pico displays the filename. (To save the edited file under a different name, delete the filename and type a new one.) PressEnter
.