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It was pico then, nano came out a bit later. But I used it because it was what pine used and I got used to it. Then I decided to learn vi and emacs sometime later.

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I have used both Pico and Nano. The selling point of Nano to me is it being small and available. I don't do my day to day work in nano, but even in the most minimal system it is normally there, which makes it useful for configuration changes in a pinch.

Another editor that works similarly to Nano, that most people don't seem to know about, is Micro (GNU) Emacs. Although it's not as small or common.

https://github.com/troglobit/mg

nano is available because it was made to be, pico is similarly small. nano was created, in large part, as a response to the license of pico, while (at the time) intending to be a drop-in replacement. Since it was under the GPL and became included in most distros, it was developed further than pico, because users of pico had to seek it out. It wasn't present on most systems without installing it yourself (or having an admin who did).

Might have been, it was so long ago.

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