Micro: A Modern Attempt At Command Line Editor

While modern open source code editors have taken the programming world by storm, Linux command line is still ruled by a selected set of text editors. Popular command line editors like Vim and Emacs are also infamous for their weird keyboard shortcuts.

In fact, there are several jokes on those weird keyboard shortcuts in the programming world. Below is such an example of a geek humor.

Micro is a modern terminal-based text editor that attempts to take the pain of keyboard shortcuts and provide popular shortcuts as well as mouse supports.

Micros is made with the GO Programming Language. It’s actively being developed by Zachary Yedidia and many other open source enthusiasts are contributing to it.

According to Micro’s GitHub project documentation,

Micro aims to be easy to use and intuitive, while also taking advantage of the full capabilities of modern terminals.

And that’s absolutely true. You’re probably wondering what’s special about this one, there are plenty of other terminal-based text editors out there. The answer is, Micro’s so easy to use that the learning curve is almost flat, you don’t need to learn anything new and it has some very interesting features.

Features

At the time of writing this article, Micro is still in early stage of development. New features are being added to it. However, some of the main current features include:

• Common keyboard shortcuts(Ctrl-S, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Z etc.)
• Syntax highlighting ( for over 75 languages)
• Color scheme support
• Search and Replace feature
• Undo and Redo
• Unicode support
• Copy and Paste from the system clipboard
• Configurable

Installation

You can download the prebuilt binary from the link below:

Download Micro

Once you download it, extract the file and you’ll find the binary file inside it. Copy this binary file to your /bin directory. And then, you can run it in the terminal using the command “micro”.

For clipboard support, you need xclip and xsel packages. In Ubuntu and other Ubuntu based Linux distributions, you can use the following command to install it:

sudo apt-get install xclip

For detailed information on configuring Micro, see here.

Thoughts about Micro?

We think that Micro’s a pretty good tool for text-editing. Though it’s not yet feature-rich like vim or other matured text-editors, it can easily replace tools like nano for everyday usage already.

If you’re an interested user and love to work from the terminal, give it a try and tell us about your experience. If you’re an interested developer and want to contribute to this project or report a bug, just head over to Micro on GitHub.

So, what’s your thought about Micro?

Image source: lol.browseling.com