micro enters the chat.

Static, portable binary with no dependencies.

Out of the box:

• Syntax highlighting
• Multi-line cursors like Sublime Text
• Mouse support
• Splits and tabs
• Diff gutter
• Copy and paste with system clipboard
• Cross-platform
• Sane key binds (ctrl-s, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-z, ctrl-x, etc)
• Plugin system
• And much much more

I have nothing to do with the project but this binary is the absolute best. curl or wget to any host and away you go with effectively a Sublime Text / VSCode like in the terminal.

It’s baffling it’s not more well known and not installed by default on major distros.

How many Linux distros include micro in their minimal image? Vim, emacs, and nano are good because I can connect to just about any container or Linux VM and expect to have all of them available.

Let’s say I have a test that always passes on my machine but fails in CI. If I can get a terminal on the test runner, I can open up my test code in vim, add extra logging and error handling, and rerun the test to check my fix.

I am not going to install additional editors in a VM that will be recreated next time I push a code change. If I am setting up a development environment for long term use, I will install my favorite IDE and configuring all the bells and whistles.