Want more from Nano? Tired of Vim? Try Micro!

Text editors are a very personal choice and can lead to endless debates to discuss which one is the best.

Across terminal editors, Vim and Nano are certainly the most popular. Vim is complex, but highly customizable and incredibly efficient when you master it, and Nano is easy to approach and use but is way less powerful.

And in between, there is now micro: it’s a terminal text editor like the two above, but with the best of both worlds. Chek out all the features!

It’s written in Go so it’s very lightweight. Just download and execute the binary, and you’re good to go.

Its keybindings are inspired by Nano, thus they are way more intuitive than Vim and you can access them any time with ^G.

It has supports for plugins (in Lua), and you can customize it as you want, including color schemes. You can use commands, like in Vim. It even has mouse support!

micro-zenburn

If you are already at ease with Vim and have your own config and plugins, then Micro isn’t for you, you can afford much better productivity with Vim.

However, if you’re a Nano user (there is no shame in that), but you want to have a bit more advanced editor, then give it a try!

There is a script called getmicro which just a simple bash script that detects your OS and architecture and downloads the latest binary into you current directory.

Then you can move the binary to /usr/bin/ or anywhere else in your PATH, so that you can use everywhere!