Fast Pico Editing

Some tricks for speeding up editing when in Pico, especially using the search Wereis? command.

Making fast cursor moves with ^W

See a misspelled word while reading the file? A word like enouhg? type e to Edit, then ^W to search, then type enouhg and the cursor jumps right to that place in the file. reverse the hg and save the file and continue reading.

Jumping to beginning or end

Want to quickly goto the end of the file, or the beginning? While editing in pico, press ^W, then ^V. The cursor jumps right to the end of the file. To go to the beginning, type ^W then ^Y. This last one is handy for going back to the top of the file to see the menu.

Jumping to named links

^W is a great time saver for editing a large file organized with internal links. Use ^W^Y to jump to the top to see the menu of file names. If you want to go to one near the bottom linked by:

     <A HREF="#cats">Many kinds of cats</A>

just type ^W then "cats" ...and jump right to:

     <h3><a name="cats">Many kinds of cats</a></h3>

The secret is putting in the double quotes around each of the destination names. You know it will have them. Very fast.

Jumping to Your own Marker

If you must repeatedly return to the same place in a file, you can place your own marker there. Use something that will not be used in the document: www, xxx, yyy or zzz, and type it in just above your working area.

To jump to your www marker, just type ^W and www

Remember to ^W to each of your markers to remove them when you are done editing.

If you want to leave your marker in a public html document, put it in a comment line:

                                                  
     <!--- www -->

Jumping to ends of lines

^Y and ^V are shown at the bottom of the Pico screen, and are real time savers.

Another pair not shown are also great time savers. ^E jumps to the end of the typed material on a line. Handy for repairing ending tags.

When near the right, you can jump back to the left margin with ^A