micro – A Modern Alternative to nano

I suggest nano to my students in classes where everyone is a beginner and we're learning programming on the command line. The greatest advantage of nano for these users is that all the commands are listed along the bottom of the screen. I was shocked to see that this is not true of micro.

If you are a sublime person, micro is your terminal based editor. Built in sublime style multi-line editing, built in super simple plugin management, intuitive tabs and splits, keyboard shortcuts you are familiar with, clipboard works across apps, shifting the current line up or down one line at a time visually (bubbling I think it's called) etc. Features that require plugins in sublime also come standard and are incredibly useful, like using it as part of a pipeline or my…

As a Windows native, for years I felt limited when shelling into Linux systems, because all editors felt weird to me. Obviously the solution would be "just learn vim already" but I'm lazy. I settled on nano because it at least shows what shortcuts are available, saving me from having to Google "how to find text in vim" every time. But its shortcuts are weird (to me) and even the descriptions are. UnCut? WhereIs? Huh? Micro really got the UX…

I know something is a good idea when my first thought is: surely there is something like this already! My second thought was: wait, I used Emacs or Pico, why hasn't someone made this. My third thought was: how do you copy and paste? Ctrl-c ctrl-v! My last thought was: I must thank the person who made this.