Micro is a user-friendly terminal-based text editor designed to leverage modern terminal capabilities

Key Points: terminal-based text editor, vim, nano

First glance

Micro is a user-friendly terminal-based text editor designed to leverage modern terminal capabilities.

It’s available as a single, self-contained binary without external dependencies, making installation easy. Serving as a successor to nano, it’s suitable for both casual terminal users and those editing files over SSH.

The editor features intuitive mouse support, common keybindings, splits, and tabs.

It offers plugins written in Lua, a built-in plugin manager, autocompletion, syntax highlighting for over 130 languages, and various customization options.

Installation can be done via prebuilt binaries, package managers like Homebrew and Snap, or by building from source.

The macOS version offers improved compatibility with iTerm2 for enhanced functionality.

Introduce

micro is a terminal-based text editor that aims to be easy to use and intuitive, while also taking advantage of the capabilities of modern terminals. It comes as a single, batteries-included, static binary with no dependencies; you can download and use it right now!

As its name indicates, micro aims to be somewhat of a successor to the nano editor by being easy to install and use. It strives to be enjoyable as a full-time editor for people who prefer to work in a terminal, or those who regularly edit files over SSH.

Here is a picture of micro editing its source code.

To see more screenshots of micro, showcasing some of the default color schemes, see here.

You can also check out the website for Micro at https://micro-editor.github.io.

Features

• Easy to use and install.
• No dependencies or external files are needed — just the binary you can download further down the page.
• Multiple cursors.
• Common keybindings (Ctrl-s, Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v, Ctrl-z, …).
  • Keybindings can be rebound to your liking.
• Sane defaults.
  • You shouldn’t have to configure much out of the box (and it is extremely easy to configure).
• Splits and tabs.
• nano-like menu to help you remember the keybindings.
• Extremely good mouse support.
  • This means mouse dragging to create a selection, double click to select by word, and triple click to select by line.
• Cross-platform (it should work on all the platforms Go runs on).
  • Note that while Windows is supported Mingw/Cygwin is not (see below).
• Plugin system (plugins are written in Lua).
  • micro has a built-in plugin manager to automatically install, remove, and update plugins.
• Built-in diff gutter.
• Simple autocompletion.
• Persistent undo.
• Automatic linting and error notifications.
• Syntax highlighting for over 130 languages.
• Color scheme support.
  • By default, micro comes with 16, 256, and true color themes.
• True color support (set the MICRO_TRUECOLOR environment variable to 1 to enable it).
• Copy and paste with the system clipboard.
• Small and simple.
• Easily configurable.
• Macros.
• Common editor features such as undo/redo, line numbers, Unicode support, soft wrapping, …