quick first impressions of micro

as of literally last night i have decided to switch terminal text editors. you see before last night i was using nano for terminal text editing, like a fucking sicko. vim/neovim and emacs looked over-engineered and too opinionated for me to go out of my way to learn.

so anyway i was looking at the awesome CLI apps list because i was bored, and found myself in the text editor section, and clicked a couple non-emacs/vim links, and thought. hmm maybe i should finally make an effort to stop using nano because hitting CTRL+X, Y, and then ENTER to save an edited file was like actually insane. so i chose micro, installed it with their one liner script, and immediately decided "ok i'm gonna force myself to get used to this by setting it as default on my system and all my servers and even aliasing nano to micro because i'm used to calling nano when i want to edit something."

and here we are. i like it so much i'm writing a blog post about it.

micro is a lot of fun! first off, the keybindings actually make sense. that sequence above to save a file? yeah in micro it's just CTRL+S and CTRL+Q, and the latter is optional, you don't have to exit to save like i was so used to. maybe you don't have to do that in nano but i never looked into it.

the UI is still something i'm getting used to, but it feels very modern, makes me feel like a real programmer. i like it a lot. and the command prompt for it that you can bring up feels very VSCode which i like the idea of more than i like using it literally at all.

i installed two plugins right off the bat - wc for word count, and cheat for programming language cheat-sheets. i don't really need either that much; word count seems unnecessary since i usually write from obsidian (as i'm doing now), and i don't know how much use i'd get out of a cheat-sheet. but just having them there i hope means i'll try to use them. especially the cheat-sheets, which may come in handy when i'm learning stuff as always.

oh when i was looking through that CLI apps list i also found and installed asciinema so here's an excuse to use that to embed their player from their site (though one day i might self host my own instance of the site...):