4 ms·
I used to recommend micro[1] to people like those in the target audience of this editor. I wonder if that should change or not. -- 1: https://micro-editor.git
by pxc 1y ago
I used to recommend micro[1] to people like those in the target audience of this editor. I wonder if that should change or not.
--
1: https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
- seabrookmx 1y agoIMO it should not. `edit` doesn't even support syntax highlighting (atleast, out of the box when I tried it).
- Litruv 1y agoI think you missed the point of edit.
- bapak 1y agoI think not. Edit is to edit files in the terminal. What kind of files do you expect people to edit in the terminal? Most certainly files that would benefit from colors, not prose.
- shakna 1y agoA lot of authors, myself included, want a "distraction free" editor. Its a whole over-populated market segment. Prose thrives in the terminal. Ice and Fire was written in WordStar, as just one popular example.
- antonvs 1y agoIs that why the series ground to a halt
- shakna 1y ago> “I’m 12 years late on this damn novel, and I’m struggling with it,” he said. “I have like 1,100 pages written, but I still have hundreds more pages to go. It’s a big mother of a book for whatever reason. Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this, but it’s tough.” He's averaging a hundred pages a year. Maybe not the fastest, but certainly not the slowest writer. With the size of his books... Cut the guy some slack.
- antonvs 1y ago> 12 years late Seems like people have cut him a lot of slack already. Of course he doesn’t really owe anything to anybody, but at some point he and everyone else has to face the reality - which is that if that book is ever published, it’ll be posthumously, finished by a ghostwriter.
- red_admiral 1y agoRachel Kroll once posted that she writes her posts in nano, with the distraction of syntax highlighting turned off: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/09/24/editor/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/09/24/editor/ I can't find the link but I think at some point she compiled her own nano with some "helpful" feature patched out again.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kristopolous 1y agoI met someone recently that still uses WordStar. Yes I'm serious. He runs it in QEMU on FreeDOS. He's a writer for a living.
- seabrookmx 1y agoI think you missed the question I was answering in my comment.
- JdeBP 1y agoThere's an underlying assumption about "target audience for this editor" that you both share, that others, I suspect quite a few others, do not. For starters, there's your assumption that there is "syntax" to be highlighted. Not every text file is something written in a computer programming language.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seabrookmx 1y agoYou're right, I do assume most (90+%? of) people that are looking for a terminal editor are likely developers. In fact I'd put money on it, but sadly do not have any evidence to back it up. If you have evidence to the contrary I'd be intrigued!
- pxc 1y agoYou might not be wrong about percentages, but there are famously some Emacs users who for into it for Org mode or academic writing, including even some who learned to program long to better customize their Emacs setup and eventually became contributors. But these are amateur geeks or geeks in the making who probably don't mind having the capability of syntax highlighting built in, even if for some purposes they want it turned off.
- kasajian 1y agoI think you're assuming people who are thinking of going beyond the original "point" of edit missed that point. We didn't. We're looking new directions it can go.
- _flux 1y agoIt might in the future, though, as the main developer has opened an issue about it: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/18 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/18 The trick is doing it while keeping the binary size small, so tree sitter is not an option.
- ComputerGuru 1y agoVim (and so many other editors, too) supported syntax highlighting for decades before TreeSitter even existed. Let’s not act as if this is a novel challenge.
- kasajian 1y agowhy would the binary size be big to support this? Scintilla has been doing syntax color for decades -- it's pretty small.
- prmoustache 1y agoLast time I checked, micro should have been called macro based on the binary file size.
- 3836293648 1y agoWell, it is orders of magnitude larger than nano, so...
- sime2009 1y agoSeriously? We're going to complain about a couple megs in a text editor in the year 2025?
- mixmastamyk 1y agoYes, couldn’t use on my router because of its size. No reason for a TUI to be so big. Advanced features outside of syntax highlighting not useful. Should have a light version. I installed nano with CUA keybindings instead.
- prmoustache 1y agoLike my mother say. Small stream makes huge rivers. Not caring about a couple of megs here and there is what makes some modern systems so bloated.
- pxc 1y agoIsn't the relatively large binary just because it's written in Golang? Go executables each ship their own copy of the Go runtime. That alone accounts for a big chunk of small programs like this. Nano also links against ncurses, which is about as big as the compressed tarball for micro. I'm looking at the dependency closures of each right now in nix-tree[1], and micro's closure's total size is 15.04 MiB while nano's is 12.78 MiB-- not really "orders of magnitude" (as a sibling commenter suggests) when you look at it like that. Admittedly, nano's dependencies (`file` and `ncurses`, on my system) are likely to ship as part of the "base system" of any Linux distro anyway; the real size it adds to any distro is negligible. But there's no indication to me that micro is meaningfully "bloated", as the meme goes; it seems like what is required to run it is reasonable and comparable to other tools that serve the same purpose. -- 1: See: https://github.com/utdemir/nix-tree https://github.com/utdemir/nix-tree ; Try `nix run nixpkgs#nix-tree -- $(nix build --no-link --json nixpkgs#nano | jq -r .[0].outputs.out)`
- smartmic 1y agoThere is also dte[1]. It hits exactly the same notch and offers an extremely lean editor with Unicode support, CUA key bindings and much more. It has replaced nano as my terminal editor. [1]: https://craigbarnes.gitlab.io/dte/ https://craigbarnes.gitlab.io/dte/
- sneak 1y agoWhy are you opposed to learning vi which is already installed everywhere?
- 4ggr0 1y agoas someone who uses CLI text editors frequently, but not often enough to build the muscle memory which remembers VI shortcuts, i really appreciate simple text editors. i know that i can press like 3-4 arbitrary buttons to mark a block to move it to a different place - how about i just mark it with my cursor and CTRL-X CTRL-V, like every freaking other program out there. i appreciate that i got VI on freshly installed or secured servers, but for things i use daily, i just want it to be KISS. already counting on people answering 'but vim is easy and simple'. opinions differ i guess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU
- IshKebab 1y agoBecause vi has all the usability of a keyboard made out of hedgehogs.
- s1mplicissimus 1y agoI wouldn't consider vi usability to be overall bad. Sure, affordance ("is it easy grasp which moves i can make without affording much cognitive effort?") is terrible. Setting up a decent environment is also a huge pain to get started with, but nowadays you can just hop into a prewarmed pool with premade setups like Normalvim or LunarVim. But usability is not just "is it easy to learn", it's also "once i know it, how hard is it to use" Once the moves are ingrained in your (muscle-)memory it becomes so incredibly efficient. di{, dat, yaf etc. are just the low hanging fruit, once you start with regex, macros and plugins the fun really begins.
- mattbee 1y agoAnd you can get it on Windows with just "winget install zyedidia.micro". Reminds me of 8 & 16-bit editors of a similar era.
- EasyMark 1y agoMicro is a great editor to replace stuff like nano. I think it would be a bad replacement for edit though, edit is very barebones, and micro is very "upgradeable" through lua. It also handles large files quite well also