14 ms·

This looks like it's aimed at being a better nano, not a better vim. I like it a lot; I wouldn't be sorry to see it take off and get included in OS X, major li

by Lazare 9y ago

This looks like it's aimed at being a better nano, not a better vim. I like it a lot; I wouldn't be sorry to see it take off and get included in OS X, major linux distros, etc. Because right now if you don't want to use vi/vim, your only reliably available option is nano, and nano is a terrible editor.

emeraldd 9y ago
Have you ever tried JOE? It's what I used prior to vim ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor
- pantalaimon 9y ago
  I find JOE much more awkward to use than nano. micro on the other hand feels a lot more like Sublime Text for the terminal. I like it. :)
  - ino 9y ago
    I like Nice Editor or ne. This one, micro, looks interesting. I’ll give it a try.
  - jhallenworld 9y ago
    What's awkward about JOE?
  - anthk 9y ago
    JOE has jpico (nano like) jstar (wordstar) and jmacs (emacs) keybindings.
mixmastamyk 9y ago
I’ve always wanted something like the old DOS edit or turbo vision editors with CUA key bindings, to the point where I maintained my own for several years around 2000. On Linux “ne” is not a bad choice, though I’d like an upgrade. Remembered why I didn’t stick with it now, it doesn’t have menus and there was a bug that has been fixed, will try again.
- muxator 9y ago
  The same for me. The TUI of MsDos Edit and Turbo Vision (for example, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C main editors) were extremely intuitive to use. I always wonder why they had no real successors in recent times.
  - jdmoreira 9y ago
    The joe editor is based on Turbo C
- didymospl 9y ago
  Have you tried mcedit? It has similar look and feel, unfortunately CUA keybindings does not seem to work
jbergstroem 9y ago
I would fit in the same category of users like you. I've been using micro for a few months and I find it a very pleasant experience. My downsides so far are: haven't found a way to disable the somewhat aggressive mouse control, haven't found a way to disable coloring background (slow rendering on remote ssh) and paste buffers being messed up in recent releases. I just opened a 500mb csv which arguably was slower than using vi/vim but still fast enough and snappy after the initial load.
- jncraton 9y ago
  I'm not sure if any of this will help or not: - You can add `mouse:off` to your config to disable the mouse - I use `cursorline:off` to help on slower connections. This prevents having to redraw an entire line when the cursor moves up or down. Feel free to open issues for anything that can be improved if you haven't already.
O1111OOO 9y ago
> nano is a terrible editor. I came across LE[0] the other day. Played around with it a bit - not bad[1]. It could end up being my replacement "simple" editor. Lots of nice additional features too (binary, hex, line drawings, colors, etc). Project seems dead since 2014 (based on Wikipedia) but there's a github page[2] setup for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LE_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LE_(text_editor) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOGPQY9LGKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOGPQY9LGKc [2] https://github.com/lavv17/le https://github.com/lavv17/le
julian37 9y ago
It's 10MB uncompressed so at that point I'd hope Emacs would have finally become a "reliably available option" first (13MB on my system). EDIT: why the downvote? Not trolling, just genuinely sad that with today's hard drive sizes it's not a given that Emacs is available virtually everywhere, like vi or nano are.
- sspiff 9y ago
  While emacs is a terrific editor (or platform for editors), it is not easy to use. It has a unique set of keyboard shortcuts, which means that for most newcomers, their familiar hotkeys or key combos will do things that they don't expect. A modern, straightforward CLI editor would help many people.
  - bostand 9y ago
    Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that. Isn't that what a true beginner would use anyway instead of the terminal version?
    - lloeki 9y ago
      We're talking terminal (not GUI) editors here. If I fire emacs on macOS there's no menu displayed by default. If I connect remotely on a Debian machine, the menu is there but mouse reporting is not working. The help, if started by itself, vanishes at the first keypress (on macOS), which makes it really easy to skip the C-x C-c part, and uses the emacs-only convention of C- instead of the well known ^ for control (although it's explained right there), thus doubly easy to miss. I can see how newcomers would be turned away from it.
      - AsyncAwait 9y ago
        vi(m) is usually included by default and is no easier to use for a beginner, so why not emacs?
        9y ago
plq 9y ago
mcedit, the editor of the infamous Norton--err, Midnight Commander, was my best friend back in the good old days of writing php via ssh directly on the server of our university's LUG. It even supports block editing! But please, instead of screaming upon being hit with that bright blue background, run mc, press F9, go to General > Appearance and select the dark or darkfar theme :) (and F10 to save config and exit) Having said that, it breaks my heart a little to see nano bashed like that. (those of you who upvoted parent, I'm looking at you too!) nano is 1) designed to be the best editor for slow connections, 2) Its source code is also quite easy to instrument. Eg. if you need a nano that is able to edit just a single file, someone familiar with application programming in C on linux can do it in no time.
- michaelmior 9y ago
  I'm curious about the claim that nano is "best editor for slow connections." What features make that the case? Genuinely curious as it's not a factor I've considered.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Remember that over SSH you have to send every character over the wire. If you have a slow connection you'll probably prefer editors that avoid redrawing a lot and nano fits the bill pretty well. Although since they added syntax highlighting it's getting pretty heavy.
    - michaelmior 9y ago
      Fair point. Personally this is why I like to use mosh[0] where possible. For a period of time, my parents had satellite Internet and unsurprisingly the latency was terrible. mosh made any remote work during my visits tolerable. [0] https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
- petre 9y ago
  Actually any vi editor is better than nano on slow connections. It has commands to move the cursor wherever you like with way less keypresses than using the directional keys.
stuaxo 9y ago
Instead of nano what I want is something like microsoft edit. Complete with all the CUA style shortcuts (alt-f for file menu, ctrl-s saves, ctrl-arrow keys for moving, shift arrow keys for highlighting). Yes, this might be nonstandard for textmode in unix, but it will match all my GUI apps much better - and like most people I use a mix.
- int_19h 9y ago
  It should be relatively easy using Free Pascal and its FreeVision text-mode UI toolkit. You get all the widgets, menus, scrollbars etc premade, complete with mouse support. They even have the editor widget with syntax highlighting already (in the text mode IDE; not sure if it's in the base library). All that's needed is to replace the default Borland-style shortcuts with CUA. http://www.principiaprogramatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/tubropascal7ide2.jpg http://www.principiaprogramatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009...
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Nice, loved turbo vision. Wonder if they could update with Unicode characters and 256+ colors?
    - int_19h 9y ago
      Unicode would probably be a significant effort. It's actually a Turbo Vision port, and, as I recall, it still uses 8-bit strings, same as original did.
    - badsectoracula 9y ago
      Both would be very hard, my Outliner Lighto [0] program uses the Video unit that Free Vision uses and the main reason it cannot do unicode is that the screen is handled as an array of 8bit pairs (one byte is used for the character and the other byte is used as a pair of 4bit numbers, one for the foreground and one for the background) pretty much the same way that CGA had its text mode. All drawing in Free Vision is done by writing directly to TDrawBuffer types which are basically arrays of such cells. Also Free Vision specifically (this isn't a limitation of the Video unit) has a maximum width limit of 255 characters (technically it is the maximum width of a view, but the "desktop", the menubar, etc are all views). You'd need a very massive overhaul to introduce unicode and more than 4bit/4bit color pairs to Free Vision. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol
empath75 9y ago
Nano is still my goto if I want to edit a config file really quickly.
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  I can tell you from experience that it wouldn't take long to learn enough vim to make you look back on that preference and wonder why you didn't learn sooner. It's a shame that for many of us our first experience with it involves Googling how to quit out. That and a higher learning curve than most editors put a lot of people off, even after they've become familiar with it.
  - nurettin 9y ago
    I'd praise vim as a 15+year vim user, but people crap on nano without even knowing the shortcuts it provides (cut/paste/move rows, justify a block of text, etc.) which are very useful when remote editing configuration files. Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi".
    - zimpenfish 9y ago
      > Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi". Adding to the pile of anecdata: I wish this every time I forget that our vagrants spin up without `EDITOR` or `VISUAL` configured which means I get nano for my first edit and, frankly, fuck that noise.
  - empath75 9y ago
    I use vim for development. If you need to add a comma you forgot to a json file, nano is faster.
  - mikegerwitz 9y ago
    Many people find themselves in nano for a quick change. They aren't interested in learning keybindings for an editor, especially (in the case of vi/vim) when those keybindings can accidentally clobber a chunk of your configuration file, sometimes without the user noticing. Nano, as other comments have stated, shows the essential keybindings at the bottom of the screen, always. (I've been using vim for over a decade.)
int_19h 9y ago
The advantage of Nano is that it is written in C, has zero required dependencies other than libc, and the compiled binary is 200 kilobytes. This makes it possible to include it in the base system, even on very tiny distros.
- deathanatos 9y ago
  Why is C an advantage? (I get "no dependencies", but that seems orthogonal to being written in C. Specifically, what does C bring that isn't minimal dependencies, or a small binary?)
  - ktta 9y ago
    It isn't, except for the fact that most people who can code low level programs know it. But what you don't want into consideration is pretty much the important part of shipping a software you want to proliferate easily.
    - megous 9y ago
      Statically linked C programs are the easiest to ship. Copy and run. No runtime required.
      - schrodinger 9y ago
        Same with go
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        A feature of any AOT compiled language since compilers exist, nothing C specific.
        rmrfrmrf 9y ago
        Java and .NET would like a word with you.
segmondy 9y ago
Checkout Jed, it's been around for a long time.
pyre 9y ago
> This looks like it's aimed at being a better nano, not a better vim I think that's the point. Seeing as nano replaced pico, and micro seems aimed at replacing nano. Also putting the SI prefixes in order of increasing size goes: pico => nano => micro If someone eventually writes a replacement for micro, it will be called milli, I imagine.
- ryenus 9y ago
  or maybe `limo`.
- bostand 9y ago
  But can it replace mg?
- type0 9y ago
  pico => nano => micro => milli => centi ...
gs1 9y ago
Emacs?
Sean1708 9y ago
In my opinion nano's biggest strength is that complete CLI beginners can use nano with almost 0 prerequisite knowledge. No reading man pages or tutorials, no accidentally hitting a key then having absolutely no idea how to get help, just "it's called nano and by the way ^ means ctrl".
spookyuser 9y ago
If people don't know how to use vi/m I highly recommend running the vimtutor command. I've been doing it in some boring tutorials and after a week I feel almost component at it.
mrkgnao 9y ago
When you forgot $EDITOR, ^O^X had your back. :)

by Lazare 9y ago

emeraldd 9y ago

Have you ever tried JOE? It's what I used prior to vim ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor

pantalaimon 9y ago
I find JOE much more awkward to use than nano. micro on the other hand feels a lot more like Sublime Text for the terminal. I like it. :)
- ino 9y ago
  I like Nice Editor or ne. This one, micro, looks interesting. I’ll give it a try.
- jhallenworld 9y ago
  What's awkward about JOE?
- anthk 9y ago
  JOE has jpico (nano like) jstar (wordstar) and jmacs (emacs) keybindings.

mixmastamyk 9y ago

I’ve always wanted something like the old DOS edit or turbo vision editors with CUA key bindings, to the point where I maintained my own for several years around 2000. On Linux “ne” is not a bad choice, though I’d like an upgrade. Remembered why I didn’t stick with it now, it doesn’t have menus and there was a bug that has been fixed, will try again.

muxator 9y ago
The same for me. The TUI of MsDos Edit and Turbo Vision (for example, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C main editors) were extremely intuitive to use. I always wonder why they had no real successors in recent times.
- jdmoreira 9y ago
  The joe editor is based on Turbo C
didymospl 9y ago
Have you tried mcedit? It has similar look and feel, unfortunately CUA keybindings does not seem to work

jbergstroem 9y ago

I would fit in the same category of users like you. I've been using micro for a few months and I find it a very pleasant experience. My downsides so far are: haven't found a way to disable the somewhat aggressive mouse control, haven't found a way to disable coloring background (slow rendering on remote ssh) and paste buffers being messed up in recent releases. I just opened a 500mb csv which arguably was slower than using vi/vim but still fast enough and snappy after the initial load.

jncraton 9y ago
I'm not sure if any of this will help or not: - You can add `mouse:off` to your config to disable the mouse - I use `cursorline:off` to help on slower connections. This prevents having to redraw an entire line when the cursor moves up or down. Feel free to open issues for anything that can be improved if you haven't already.

O1111OOO 9y ago

> nano is a terrible editor. I came across LE[0] the other day. Played around with it a bit - not bad[1]. It could end up being my replacement "simple" editor. Lots of nice additional features too (binary, hex, line drawings, colors, etc). Project seems dead since 2014 (based on Wikipedia) but there's a github page[2] setup for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LE_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LE_(text_editor) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOGPQY9LGKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOGPQY9LGKc [2] https://github.com/lavv17/le https://github.com/lavv17/le

julian37 9y ago

It's 10MB uncompressed so at that point I'd hope Emacs would have finally become a "reliably available option" first (13MB on my system). EDIT: why the downvote? Not trolling, just genuinely sad that with today's hard drive sizes it's not a given that Emacs is available virtually everywhere, like vi or nano are.

sspiff 9y ago
While emacs is a terrific editor (or platform for editors), it is not easy to use. It has a unique set of keyboard shortcuts, which means that for most newcomers, their familiar hotkeys or key combos will do things that they don't expect. A modern, straightforward CLI editor would help many people.
- bostand 9y ago
  Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that. Isn't that what a true beginner would use anyway instead of the terminal version?
  - lloeki 9y ago
    We're talking terminal (not GUI) editors here. If I fire emacs on macOS there's no menu displayed by default. If I connect remotely on a Debian machine, the menu is there but mouse reporting is not working. The help, if started by itself, vanishes at the first keypress (on macOS), which makes it really easy to skip the C-x C-c part, and uses the emacs-only convention of C- instead of the well known ^ for control (although it's explained right there), thus doubly easy to miss. I can see how newcomers would be turned away from it.
    - AsyncAwait 9y ago
      vi(m) is usually included by default and is no easier to use for a beginner, so why not emacs?
      - 9y ago

plq 9y ago

mcedit, the editor of the infamous Norton--err, Midnight Commander, was my best friend back in the good old days of writing php via ssh directly on the server of our university's LUG. It even supports block editing! But please, instead of screaming upon being hit with that bright blue background, run mc, press F9, go to General > Appearance and select the dark or darkfar theme :) (and F10 to save config and exit) Having said that, it breaks my heart a little to see nano bashed like that. (those of you who upvoted parent, I'm looking at you too!) nano is 1) designed to be the best editor for slow connections, 2) Its source code is also quite easy to instrument. Eg. if you need a nano that is able to edit just a single file, someone familiar with application programming in C on linux can do it in no time.

michaelmior 9y ago
I'm curious about the claim that nano is "best editor for slow connections." What features make that the case? Genuinely curious as it's not a factor I've considered.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Remember that over SSH you have to send every character over the wire. If you have a slow connection you'll probably prefer editors that avoid redrawing a lot and nano fits the bill pretty well. Although since they added syntax highlighting it's getting pretty heavy.
  - michaelmior 9y ago
    Fair point. Personally this is why I like to use mosh[0] where possible. For a period of time, my parents had satellite Internet and unsurprisingly the latency was terrible. mosh made any remote work during my visits tolerable. [0] https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
petre 9y ago
Actually any vi editor is better than nano on slow connections. It has commands to move the cursor wherever you like with way less keypresses than using the directional keys.

stuaxo 9y ago

Instead of nano what I want is something like microsoft edit. Complete with all the CUA style shortcuts (alt-f for file menu, ctrl-s saves, ctrl-arrow keys for moving, shift arrow keys for highlighting). Yes, this might be nonstandard for textmode in unix, but it will match all my GUI apps much better - and like most people I use a mix.

int_19h 9y ago
It should be relatively easy using Free Pascal and its FreeVision text-mode UI toolkit. You get all the widgets, menus, scrollbars etc premade, complete with mouse support. They even have the editor widget with syntax highlighting already (in the text mode IDE; not sure if it's in the base library). All that's needed is to replace the default Borland-style shortcuts with CUA. http://www.principiaprogramatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/tubropascal7ide2.jpg http://www.principiaprogramatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009...
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Nice, loved turbo vision. Wonder if they could update with Unicode characters and 256+ colors?
  - int_19h 9y ago
    Unicode would probably be a significant effort. It's actually a Turbo Vision port, and, as I recall, it still uses 8-bit strings, same as original did.
  - badsectoracula 9y ago
    Both would be very hard, my Outliner Lighto [0] program uses the Video unit that Free Vision uses and the main reason it cannot do unicode is that the screen is handled as an array of 8bit pairs (one byte is used for the character and the other byte is used as a pair of 4bit numbers, one for the foreground and one for the background) pretty much the same way that CGA had its text mode. All drawing in Free Vision is done by writing directly to TDrawBuffer types which are basically arrays of such cells. Also Free Vision specifically (this isn't a limitation of the Video unit) has a maximum width limit of 255 characters (technically it is the maximum width of a view, but the "desktop", the menubar, etc are all views). You'd need a very massive overhaul to introduce unicode and more than 4bit/4bit color pairs to Free Vision. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol

empath75 9y ago

Nano is still my goto if I want to edit a config file really quickly.

brazzledazzle 9y ago
I can tell you from experience that it wouldn't take long to learn enough vim to make you look back on that preference and wonder why you didn't learn sooner. It's a shame that for many of us our first experience with it involves Googling how to quit out. That and a higher learning curve than most editors put a lot of people off, even after they've become familiar with it.
- nurettin 9y ago
  I'd praise vim as a 15+year vim user, but people crap on nano without even knowing the shortcuts it provides (cut/paste/move rows, justify a block of text, etc.) which are very useful when remote editing configuration files. Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi".
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    > Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi". Adding to the pile of anecdata: I wish this every time I forget that our vagrants spin up without `EDITOR` or `VISUAL` configured which means I get nano for my first edit and, frankly, fuck that noise.
- empath75 9y ago
  I use vim for development. If you need to add a comma you forgot to a json file, nano is faster.
- mikegerwitz 9y ago
  Many people find themselves in nano for a quick change. They aren't interested in learning keybindings for an editor, especially (in the case of vi/vim) when those keybindings can accidentally clobber a chunk of your configuration file, sometimes without the user noticing. Nano, as other comments have stated, shows the essential keybindings at the bottom of the screen, always. (I've been using vim for over a decade.)

int_19h 9y ago

The advantage of Nano is that it is written in C, has zero required dependencies other than libc, and the compiled binary is 200 kilobytes. This makes it possible to include it in the base system, even on very tiny distros.

deathanatos 9y ago
Why is C an advantage? (I get "no dependencies", but that seems orthogonal to being written in C. Specifically, what does C bring that isn't minimal dependencies, or a small binary?)
- ktta 9y ago
  It isn't, except for the fact that most people who can code low level programs know it. But what you don't want into consideration is pretty much the important part of shipping a software you want to proliferate easily.
  - megous 9y ago
    Statically linked C programs are the easiest to ship. Copy and run. No runtime required.
    - schrodinger 9y ago
      Same with go
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      A feature of any AOT compiled language since compilers exist, nothing C specific.
      - rmrfrmrf 9y ago
        Java and .NET would like a word with you.

segmondy 9y ago

Checkout Jed, it's been around for a long time.

pyre 9y ago

> This looks like it's aimed at being a better nano, not a better vim I think that's the point. Seeing as nano replaced pico, and micro seems aimed at replacing nano. Also putting the SI prefixes in order of increasing size goes: pico => nano => micro If someone eventually writes a replacement for micro, it will be called milli, I imagine.

ryenus 9y ago
or maybe `limo`.
bostand 9y ago
But can it replace mg?
type0 9y ago
pico => nano => micro => milli => centi ...

gs1 9y ago

Emacs?

Sean1708 9y ago

In my opinion nano's biggest strength is that complete CLI beginners can use nano with almost 0 prerequisite knowledge. No reading man pages or tutorials, no accidentally hitting a key then having absolutely no idea how to get help, just "it's called nano and by the way ^ means ctrl".

spookyuser 9y ago

If people don't know how to use vi/m I highly recommend running the vimtutor command. I've been doing it in some boring tutorials and after a week I feel almost component at it.

mrkgnao 9y ago

When you forgot $EDITOR, ^O^X had your back. :)