The reason people laugh at pico is that its default configuration is to hard-wrap lines of text over 80 characters, thus reaking havoc with a variety of configuration files, program source, and other machine readable text. Then people say, "hey, how come XXX doesn't work?", and it turns out the answer is "you used pico!".

I forgot all about that. And this:

bbedit -w to open BBEdit and have it wait until you are done to send the contents back to the shell. You can then "EDITOR=bbedit -w" in your shell source.

is particularly cool.