Subject: Pico line length

From: Joe Brennan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 94 12:51:01 EST

Pico seems to have some arbitrary line-length limitation.  I don't see
an option to change it.

While we have Pine 3.89, I'm about to suggest people edit their .newsrc
to subscribe and unsubscribe, but I see they can get into big trouble
if the .newsrc was created by rn or trn and has a line like this:

news.answers! 1-17801,17805,17860-17862,17880-17881,17892,17901-17905,17920-17921,17926,17933-17935,17945,17948-17956,17958-17959,17961-17963,17983,17990-17993,18013-18017,18058-18059,18062,18073-18075,18095-18106,18117,18122-18123,18148-18155,18278,18858

since Pico rewrites it to several 80-column lines like this:

news.answers! 1-17801,17805,17860-17862,17880-17881,17892,17901-17905,17920-1792
1,17926,17933-17935,17945,17948-17956,17958-17959,17961-17963,17983,17990-17993,
18013-18017,18058-18059,18062,18073-18075,18095-18106,18117,18122-18123,18148-18
155,18278,18858

and now rn can't read it.  Woof.

(This current message was written with Emacs.)

Joseph Brennan     Academic Information Systems
                   Columbia University in the City of New York
                   [email-masked]

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 1994 10:57:29 -0800 (PST)

Joe,

Pico appears to have a 255 character line length limit when reading a file. 
It can however compose and write longer lines.  I will make sure this gets on
the bug/limitation list.  The next version of Pine will have
subscribe/unsubscribe commands, so you should not have to put up with the
pain of editing .newsrc by hand for too long ;)

--DLM

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: John Stumbles <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 1994 19:23:46 GMT

Given the choice, I'd rather use pico than vi to compose my news messages :-)

Actually, given the choice I'd rather use Pico than just about any 
standard or semi-standard Unix editor for anything that doesn't involve 
regular-expression matching (emacs/vi/etc fans please Reply-to: /dev/nul ;-))

Question is - can I use pico separately from pine on a Unix system, as I 
can (and do!) on a PC? I can't find an executable for pico in the same 
directory as pine (I do 'which pine' and then list the directory it's in) 
so does that mean that pico is part of the pine executable, and is only 
available separately if compiled separately?

I'm asking on the net rather than from our sysadmin because (a) its late 
and the sysadmin has gone home and (b) because others may like this info 
too. 

I've struggled with vi and micro-emacs and I know I'm not the only person
crying out for a halfway decent editor for wordsmithing (and even for
non-document use: actually I was prompted to write this by Joe Brennan's
query about using pico for editing .newsrc) - and a halfway decent editor
I'm already familiar with (from pine) seems too good to be true!  I think
pico could be for general unix file-bashing what pine is for mail - a
powerful easy-to-use tool for the non-techies. 

John Stumbles                                       [email-masked]
University of Reading                                              0734 318435
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK
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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 1994 12:01:26 -0800 (PST)

John,

Yes, there is a standalone Pico for Unix.  It is usually installed in the
same directory as Pine, but not necessarily.  Apparently your sysadmin
neglected or declined to install it... 

Thanks for the request!

--DLM