8 ms·

I wonder what the target audience is for an editor like this is. Most folks who use Vim/Emacs seem loyal to their editor and are not in much need of alternativ

I wonder what the target audience is for an editor like this is. Most folks who use Vim/Emacs seem loyal to their editor and are not in much need of alternatives. Those who don't have plenty of graphical ones—Sublime, VS, Atom.

moosingin3space 9y ago
The target audience is people who casually use the terminal (probably over ssh) and need something simple to edit a config file with. This comes with all the basics that people expect from a graphical editor like Notepad++ and comes with familiar keybindings from CUA applications. I could see something like this being very useful for that use case.
- discreteevent 9y ago
  That's actually a big market. People coming from vim will wonder what would you use it for when vim is so much more powerful. But this is a godsend to users who are used to gui editors. If they want something that behaves like every other editor and IDE they use there is very little available. In particular I don't know of any terminal editor that comes as a single binary and uses standard keystrokes like micro.
  - marssaxman 9y ago
    I wrote an editor which more-or-less matches that description: http://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette http://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette I've never expected nor done any work to attract users other than myself, so there are a handful of rough edges I've never bothered to polish, but I have in fact been using this thing full-time for several years. Perhaps I wouldn't have written it if micro had existed back then.
    - mixmastamyk 9y ago
      Cool, any screen shots? Would like to see the tabs with a few files open.
      - marssaxman 9y ago
        Thanks for your interest. I've added a couple of screenshots to the readme. I usually run ozette in a terminal filling one monitor, with 2-3 files open. It works fine with more, but you just can't see much of their contents; still, seeing the edges of the other files in a stack behind the active tab somehow helps my sense of spatial navigation. It's funny how life works. There is nothing especially sophisticated about this bit of code, it has many little bugs I've never bothered to fix, and I'd design it completely differently if I started now. Still, though: after thirty-plus years writing code, I've gotten more actual use out of this little tool than anything else I've ever written. Judging by the ratio of hours spent writing it to hours spent using it, nothing else even comes close, not within an order of magnitude.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    The reason they don't use those standard keystrokes is because for a terminal there is a much older standard that takes precedence regarding control characters. What's ctrl-z do? Background, or undo? It's nice for undo, but losing backgrounding capability is crippling if you use it.
    - kpil 9y ago
      Solution. Add an additional unix control key to all keyboards. Maybe actually instead of caps-lock. I think I've solved all my keyboard related problems know.
      - kps 9y ago
        The solution adopted by Unix-era GUIs, and the Macintosh, was to use a different key for GUI shortcuts rather than overloading Control. X11 generically calls it ‘Meta’, USB calls it ‘GUI’, Sun had Diamond, etc. It was only Windows that botched it, and the this-is-finally-the-year-of-Linux-on-the-desktop-trust-me-this-time crowd who slavishly imitate it while ignoring Unix experience.
        gh02t 9y ago
        Funny enough, I use the Win key on my keyboard effectively as a 'meta' for all my shortcuts in i3. It was the only key that wasn't doing anything.
    - mixmastamyk 9y ago
      It’s rare to need to background a console editor, and many can run commands themselves in the background. Combined with tabbed and split terminals not much if anything is lost.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        > It’s rare to need to background a console editor, LOL. My experience with an average of 5-6 backgrounded vims *per each named tmux session" which I use to keep track of different source files I'm working on goes against this. Sure, I can use vim's windows, but I don't want split screen usually (I'll use the other terminal I have open if I do). I don't use tmux's windows either really. It's more a way to preserve session when changing workstations (these are remote terminals), and preserve against network drops. I use each tmux session as a contained work environment for the most part. I do all my software development using vim on a remote server, and have for most of the last two decades. I've worked with numerous other developers that work similarly for professional projects, personal projects, or both. Let's just say that there might be people that use the combined features of terminal applications, terminals, and remote connections in ways that you might think were rare, but actually have large following and leave it at that. :)
  - deathanatos 9y ago
    Windows doesn't have sshfs, do they? If it did, you could just mount the remote, and use whatever UI editor you want. I do this with gvim (but on Linux)
arnvidr 9y ago
I would imagine replacing the simpler editors, like nano.
apk-d 9y ago
Coming from a Windows background, Vim/Emacs are alien to me and Nano feels underpowered and weird. For lightweight text editing, this appeals to me much more at first glance.
worldsayshi 9y ago
I would really like to see a fully featured terminal based editor that is built with modern keybindings in mind. I've given Emacs a solid chance but ended up switching to Atom (weird keybindings and configuration that kept breaking made me leave in the end). I like most things about Atom. The package system. How it's configured and navigated. But there's a simplicity (and memory footprint) of the terminal based UI that is missing to really make it the perfect editor (for me).
dcre 9y ago
I use Atom for most of my work, but sometimes it's more convenient to edit a file on the command line.
wry_discontent 9y ago
I'm a pretty hardcore Emacs user, and I'll just come right out and say it: I hate Emacs. However, the only thing I hate more than Emacs is anything else. I tried to move to Atom, because I've heard good things, I read you could extend it in JS and that sounded good to me. The difference between customizing Emacs and customizing Atom could not be more night and day in my experience. Emacs is like a living thing, as crazy as that sounds. I feel the urge to make a slight customization to a key (which happens often) I just ask Emacs what function the key is executing and either wrap it in a custom function, or advise the function. I usually write and eval these customizations in the scratch buffer. Meanwhile, Atom makes me restart to get any changes detected. There wasn't any live documentation system that I could find (which is something I can't fathom not having now). Emacs, in terms of customization, is simply light years ahead of absolutely everything else. It's absurd to me that we're still stuck with it because seemingly nobody who wants to make a text editor has learned the lessons it has.
- shalabhc 9y ago
  Over at howl.io we're building an editor that's live editable like emacs. You can eval snippets of lua or moonscript code and they take effect immediately.
  - soapdog 9y ago
    Is the windows 10 version stable yet?
- SPBS 9y ago
  I'm curious, then what makes you hate Emacs?
  - Blackthorn 9y ago
    I'm not him, but I have the same opinion. Emacs doesn't play super well with others. You can do a lot of things in emacs, but you can't do emacs in other things. On the occasions that I'm writing Java, I find IntelliJ to be super awesome. But I get annoyed because the editor in IntelliJ is not emacs. I'd like to be able to do things I can do in emacs in IntelliJ. Realistically, that means replacing the IntelliJ editor with emacs, but at the moment that isn't really possible. Some things you can use emacs for, like editing web forms (I used to do that with an extension in Firefox), but emacs is really not so great at being used in other programs. As far as emacs itself, the somewhat crappy GUI rendering precludes creating an IntelliJ like experience.
gabrielgoh 9y ago
When working over ssh, its handy to have a text editor for making small edits here and there. I'm very excited about this editor!
brianon99 9y ago
Agree. Though micro looks very good as a light weight editor for programmers, arguably better than vim in some way, it cannot move (neo)vim users like me away. Borrowing Linus Torvalds words on why he is using micro-emacs, "My fingers cannot be retrained."
jtokoph 9y ago
I use VSCode for 99% of my work but I have EDITOR=micro for quick edits and for all of my git message writing. I don’t want to load a vscode session just for a quick commit message, but I want longer free form than you can achieve with “-m”. I also bind save and quit to a single key combo for quickness.
tscs37 9y ago
Hardcore ex Nano user here. I prefer Nano nowadays since it has more sanity in key bindings and Works quite well as a replacement for Nano.
- kronos29296 9y ago
  Do you use nano instead of nano? Is it typo?
  - tscs37 9y ago
    Yeah a typo. I'm slightly sick and wasn't quite awake at the time. I filled an issue regarding that but the maintainer seems absent.
atilaneves 9y ago
Emacs _is_ a graphical editor. You have to type `emacs -nw` to make it run in the terminal under usual conditions.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
One use case would be a fallback editor for junior developers. It's still important to have syntax coloring for things like config files, JSON files, editing shell scripts and writing Git commit messages; and you can't always use the IDE for these things: * The IDE can be too slow to start. * Maybe it's not working today. * Maybe it's not on the server. Vim addresses nearly all the requirements -- it's reliable; it's easy to use as $EDITOR, to be called by other CLI tools; and it offers great syntax coloring and editing options. It's just that it's too confusing. The old joke about developers shutting off the computer to quit...
- BenjiWiebe 9y ago
  Please. Nowadays vim tells you how to quit. If you press control c, it clearly explains how to exit. I learned vim a few years ago, and immediately figured out how to exit it (just do what it says!) and by now it's my main editor and I love it.
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    > Nowadays vim tells you how to quit. If you press control c, it clearly explains how to exit. I'm not sure whether I am happy or sad that it does that now.

moosingin3space 9y ago

The target audience is people who casually use the terminal (probably over ssh) and need something simple to edit a config file with. This comes with all the basics that people expect from a graphical editor like Notepad++ and comes with familiar keybindings from CUA applications. I could see something like this being very useful for that use case.

discreteevent 9y ago
That's actually a big market. People coming from vim will wonder what would you use it for when vim is so much more powerful. But this is a godsend to users who are used to gui editors. If they want something that behaves like every other editor and IDE they use there is very little available. In particular I don't know of any terminal editor that comes as a single binary and uses standard keystrokes like micro.
- marssaxman 9y ago
  I wrote an editor which more-or-less matches that description: http://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette http://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette I've never expected nor done any work to attract users other than myself, so there are a handful of rough edges I've never bothered to polish, but I have in fact been using this thing full-time for several years. Perhaps I wouldn't have written it if micro had existed back then.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Cool, any screen shots? Would like to see the tabs with a few files open.
    - marssaxman 9y ago
      Thanks for your interest. I've added a couple of screenshots to the readme. I usually run ozette in a terminal filling one monitor, with 2-3 files open. It works fine with more, but you just can't see much of their contents; still, seeing the edges of the other files in a stack behind the active tab somehow helps my sense of spatial navigation. It's funny how life works. There is nothing especially sophisticated about this bit of code, it has many little bugs I've never bothered to fix, and I'd design it completely differently if I started now. Still, though: after thirty-plus years writing code, I've gotten more actual use out of this little tool than anything else I've ever written. Judging by the ratio of hours spent writing it to hours spent using it, nothing else even comes close, not within an order of magnitude.
- kbenson 9y ago
  The reason they don't use those standard keystrokes is because for a terminal there is a much older standard that takes precedence regarding control characters. What's ctrl-z do? Background, or undo? It's nice for undo, but losing backgrounding capability is crippling if you use it.
  - kpil 9y ago
    Solution. Add an additional unix control key to all keyboards. Maybe actually instead of caps-lock. I think I've solved all my keyboard related problems know.
    - kps 9y ago
      The solution adopted by Unix-era GUIs, and the Macintosh, was to use a different key for GUI shortcuts rather than overloading Control. X11 generically calls it ‘Meta’, USB calls it ‘GUI’, Sun had Diamond, etc. It was only Windows that botched it, and the this-is-finally-the-year-of-Linux-on-the-desktop-trust-me-this-time crowd who slavishly imitate it while ignoring Unix experience.
      - gh02t 9y ago
        Funny enough, I use the Win key on my keyboard effectively as a 'meta' for all my shortcuts in i3. It was the only key that wasn't doing anything.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    It’s rare to need to background a console editor, and many can run commands themselves in the background. Combined with tabbed and split terminals not much if anything is lost.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      > It’s rare to need to background a console editor, LOL. My experience with an average of 5-6 backgrounded vims *per each named tmux session" which I use to keep track of different source files I'm working on goes against this. Sure, I can use vim's windows, but I don't want split screen usually (I'll use the other terminal I have open if I do). I don't use tmux's windows either really. It's more a way to preserve session when changing workstations (these are remote terminals), and preserve against network drops. I use each tmux session as a contained work environment for the most part. I do all my software development using vim on a remote server, and have for most of the last two decades. I've worked with numerous other developers that work similarly for professional projects, personal projects, or both. Let's just say that there might be people that use the combined features of terminal applications, terminals, and remote connections in ways that you might think were rare, but actually have large following and leave it at that. :)
- deathanatos 9y ago
  Windows doesn't have sshfs, do they? If it did, you could just mount the remote, and use whatever UI editor you want. I do this with gvim (but on Linux)

arnvidr 9y ago

I would imagine replacing the simpler editors, like nano.

apk-d 9y ago

Coming from a Windows background, Vim/Emacs are alien to me and Nano feels underpowered and weird. For lightweight text editing, this appeals to me much more at first glance.

worldsayshi 9y ago

I would really like to see a fully featured terminal based editor that is built with modern keybindings in mind. I've given Emacs a solid chance but ended up switching to Atom (weird keybindings and configuration that kept breaking made me leave in the end). I like most things about Atom. The package system. How it's configured and navigated. But there's a simplicity (and memory footprint) of the terminal based UI that is missing to really make it the perfect editor (for me).

dcre 9y ago

I use Atom for most of my work, but sometimes it's more convenient to edit a file on the command line.

wry_discontent 9y ago

I'm a pretty hardcore Emacs user, and I'll just come right out and say it: I hate Emacs. However, the only thing I hate more than Emacs is anything else. I tried to move to Atom, because I've heard good things, I read you could extend it in JS and that sounded good to me. The difference between customizing Emacs and customizing Atom could not be more night and day in my experience. Emacs is like a living thing, as crazy as that sounds. I feel the urge to make a slight customization to a key (which happens often) I just ask Emacs what function the key is executing and either wrap it in a custom function, or advise the function. I usually write and eval these customizations in the scratch buffer. Meanwhile, Atom makes me restart to get any changes detected. There wasn't any live documentation system that I could find (which is something I can't fathom not having now). Emacs, in terms of customization, is simply light years ahead of absolutely everything else. It's absurd to me that we're still stuck with it because seemingly nobody who wants to make a text editor has learned the lessons it has.

shalabhc 9y ago
Over at howl.io we're building an editor that's live editable like emacs. You can eval snippets of lua or moonscript code and they take effect immediately.
- soapdog 9y ago
  Is the windows 10 version stable yet?
SPBS 9y ago
I'm curious, then what makes you hate Emacs?
- Blackthorn 9y ago
  I'm not him, but I have the same opinion. Emacs doesn't play super well with others. You can do a lot of things in emacs, but you can't do emacs in other things. On the occasions that I'm writing Java, I find IntelliJ to be super awesome. But I get annoyed because the editor in IntelliJ is not emacs. I'd like to be able to do things I can do in emacs in IntelliJ. Realistically, that means replacing the IntelliJ editor with emacs, but at the moment that isn't really possible. Some things you can use emacs for, like editing web forms (I used to do that with an extension in Firefox), but emacs is really not so great at being used in other programs. As far as emacs itself, the somewhat crappy GUI rendering precludes creating an IntelliJ like experience.

gabrielgoh 9y ago

When working over ssh, its handy to have a text editor for making small edits here and there. I'm very excited about this editor!

brianon99 9y ago

Agree. Though micro looks very good as a light weight editor for programmers, arguably better than vim in some way, it cannot move (neo)vim users like me away. Borrowing Linus Torvalds words on why he is using micro-emacs, "My fingers cannot be retrained."

jtokoph 9y ago

I use VSCode for 99% of my work but I have EDITOR=micro for quick edits and for all of my git message writing. I don’t want to load a vscode session just for a quick commit message, but I want longer free form than you can achieve with “-m”. I also bind save and quit to a single key combo for quickness.

tscs37 9y ago

Hardcore ex Nano user here. I prefer Nano nowadays since it has more sanity in key bindings and Works quite well as a replacement for Nano.

kronos29296 9y ago
Do you use nano instead of nano? Is it typo?
- tscs37 9y ago
  Yeah a typo. I'm slightly sick and wasn't quite awake at the time. I filled an issue regarding that but the maintainer seems absent.

atilaneves 9y ago

Emacs _is_ a graphical editor. You have to type `emacs -nw` to make it run in the terminal under usual conditions.

solidsnack9000 9y ago

One use case would be a fallback editor for junior developers. It's still important to have syntax coloring for things like config files, JSON files, editing shell scripts and writing Git commit messages; and you can't always use the IDE for these things: * The IDE can be too slow to start. * Maybe it's not working today. * Maybe it's not on the server. Vim addresses nearly all the requirements -- it's reliable; it's easy to use as $EDITOR, to be called by other CLI tools; and it offers great syntax coloring and editing options. It's just that it's too confusing. The old joke about developers shutting off the computer to quit...

BenjiWiebe 9y ago
Please. Nowadays vim tells you how to quit. If you press control c, it clearly explains how to exit. I learned vim a few years ago, and immediately figured out how to exit it (just do what it says!) and by now it's my main editor and I love it.
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
  > Nowadays vim tells you how to quit. If you press control c, it clearly explains how to exit. I'm not sure whether I am happy or sad that it does that now.