GNU nano’s two instances of naming by analogy

The folks in the free software community have a knack for coming up with clever names for their creations. Just look at GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) and Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) as prime examples.

On Mastodon, Simon Tatham shared the story of nano and its double-meaning naming.

The GNU nano text editor is named by analogy, after an earlier (non-Free) editor with a very similar UI, called pico. The name puns on SI prefixes: “like pico, but a bit bigger.”

pico was derived from the email client Pine: it’s the built-in editor Pine used for composing emails, pulled out and turned into a standalone tool. Short for PIne COmposer, as far as I know.

And Pine was also named by analogy, after an earlier email client called Elm.

So nano has two instances of “name a program by analogy to a previous one” in the history of how it got its name. (Not counting the step in between where pine gave rise to pico, because that wasn’t by analogy.)

Can anyone think of a longer chain than that, involving three or more generations of naming-by-analogy? Or is nano the record holder?

In the replies, they also mentioned Micro, another editor that aims to be a bit more feature-rich than GNU nano.