When comparing pico vs qemacs (for quick emacs), the Slant community recommends qemacs (for quick emacs) for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal text editors?” qemacs (for quick emacs) is ranked 15th while pico is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose qemacs (for quick emacs) is:
Including e.g. Chinese.
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Pros
Pro Built-in cheat sheet for shortcuts
All command characters are shown at the bottom of the editor.
Pro Easy to use
Pico includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Pro Input methods for most (human) languages
Including e.g. Chinese.
Pro Terminal and graphics mode
Supports the terminal mode with 'qemacs -nw' and a graphics mode.
Pro Good documentation and help
- Context sensitive shortcut help on F1.
- Good online documentation.
Pro Comfortable file browser
Easy to open and manage files (dired-mode).
Pro Supports many editing modes besides text
- Hex
- HTML / CSS
- Image
- Audio/video (maybe not the most sought after mode in a text editor, but, well, it's there)
Pro Full UTF-8 support
Including bi-directional writing.
Pro Super lightweight and fast
Pro Emacs like key-bindings
Use your muscle memory if you know Emacs already.
Cons
Con No way to override command characters
Characters such as ^D, ^T, ^L, etc will always be interpreted as commands and there's no way to write them in text.
Con Lacks some commonly expected functionality even for a basic editor
Pico lacks search and replace functionality as well as the ability to work work with multiple files at the same time.