micro, a nice little text editor

screenshot-from-2016-09-18-15-24-13

micro – https://github.com/zyedidia/micro – is a terminal-based text editor. Unlike vi, emacs and nano, it has sensible default command keys: Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Q quits, Ctrl+X/C/V cuts/copies/pastes, etc. micro also supports full mouse control (even over ssh), Unicode and colour syntax highlighting.

micro is written in Go – https://golang.org – so is very easy to install:

go get -u github.com/zyedidia/micro/...

If you don’t already have Go installed, it’s pretty simple, even on a Raspberry Pi: https://golang.org/doc/install

If your running under Linux, you probably want to have xclip installed for better cut/paste support.

Overall, I really like micro. It’s much easier to use than any of the standard Linux text editors. It uses key commands that most people expect. Creating code should not be made harder than it needs to be.

(I was about to suggest FTE, as it appears to be the closest thing to the old MS-DOS 6 editor that I’ve seen under Linux. While it’s a great plain text editor, its Unicode support isn’t where it needs to be in 2016.
micro suggestion came via MetaFilter’s Ctrl + Q to quit. Need I say more?
)

2 comments

  1. in order to get the markdown pictured to become the body text, I had to do the absurd:

    cmark --smart ~/Desktop/micro.md | tidy -utf8 -asxhtml --add-xml-decl yes --input-encoding utf8 --output-encoding ascii > ~/Desktop/micro.html

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