I've been really taken with Micro for a couple years.
I have the classic GUI-style control key combinations (^Z,X,C,V,F, etc.) so deeply in my fingers that I inevitably try to use them everywhere, appropriate or not, and Micro does the right thing with them. Super intuitive (Ctrl+Arrows to jump words) and/or mnemonic (Ctrl+T for Tab) for the usual text-editor features. A good selection of power feature like Sublime-ish multiple cursors and a scriptable command line. Mouse integration just works in X. Hooks xclip or xsel to integrate with the system clipboard. Etc.
And (being written in go), it's super easy to make static binaries and/or cross-compile to drop on machines which are fucked or you have limited access to or the like. Eg. if you need an editor on some random embedded ARM Linux box, you can'env GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm CGO_ENABLED=0 make' and a few seconds later you have a binary to drop there.
Micro is awesome! My only gripe is that the default color scheme doesn't respect your terminal's settings, but that is quickly remedied with `set colorscheme simple` (cmc-16 also works).
I waited for micro for twenty years. Hobbled with nano+config files, then ne, tolerable but not great. If it only had a menu like turbovision, I’d absolutely love it.
... why is troff on a list of terminal editors? It can format text for the terminal, sure - and it's quite versatile, as I discovered playing around with it - but it's as much of an editor as LaTeX or markdown.
That said, if I used to find new editors fascinating - http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl - these days I just can't imagine leaving Emacs and my own customizations behind.
I used to use Joe all the time too. Eventually for work I was working on a lot of systems where I couldn’t easily install it so I moved away from it, but it was a good one.
Joe gang! I also started using it about 20 years ago because, for whatever reason, that was the editor that was there and the editor I heard about, and then I never stopped.
I was just wondering the same thing. Like, I get that ed isn't exactly a household name when it comes to software generally, but in the very specific world of terminal emulators it's practically royalty.
jed is the one I have fond memories of. Back before I could manage vi or emacs, it provided a dead-simple to use editor with "traditional" key bindings (e.g. ctrl-s to save), was often installed by default on random cheap servers, and provided working syntax highlighting out of the box.
Jed's author (John E Davis) was also super friendly. Way back when, I was connecting to the university's terminal servers using a dumb terminal. My terminal was unusual in that it had 64 different colors, and this was the kind of thing you couldn't easily get at by fixing your termcap entry. I sent an email to him, and a day or two later, he added capabilities specifically for my terminal. After that, I had very colorful source code for the rest of my schooling. I only stopped using jed after I graduated when I went to work for a Windows (Visual C++) shop.
I'd love to use a terminal editor with Sublime-like keyboard scheme. In fact if Sublime HQ started selling a terminal version of Sublime Text, I'd buy it.
This reminds me of last year when I got over with vim and I knew about micro. Since that I lived with " alias vim='micro' " into my zsh config. It is not that famous and cannot be customized a lot like vim but I always hated going between modes.
Troff is not a terminal editor, either. It's a document markup language, like Tex. It belongs to the family Runoff->nroff->troff->ditroff, and lives on as the horror in which UNIX manual pages are written.
I still remember using troff to create typeset output on a C/A/T phototypesetter hooked up to a PDP/11 running Version 7 Unix in the early 1980s. This article has a description of how that phototypesetter worked: https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/index.html
Still using Troff as my everyday text formatting software. Heirloom Troff works with UTF8 encoding, OTF fonts, Knuth's breaking line algorithm, etc. It does what I want without deciding by itself, has much better support for microtypography then LaTeX, etc.
There are various Xi frontend implementations[1], some of which are entirely terminal based like xi-term[2]. Xi _itself_ does not implement any UI, but there is an example implementation in Xi-Mac[3].
Worth noting, mg has long been included in OpenBSD as the default Emacs-like editor, and now plays the same role in Mac OS. (I’m not sure if Apple distributes the same branch as the one maintained in OpenBSD, though.)
It's like a micro-version of emacs. Imagine an editor just to fit your muscular memory, but without all the elisp and stuff. Just for those quick edits.
I've been using THE (The Hessling Editor) steadily since 2012 for work and for personal projects. Its ability to incorporate Rexx makes it easy to customize the editor as well as facilitate use with other useful programs such as Freeplane, or launch and track Microsoft Office work.
Vim and Emacs are part of standard toolsets in a wider base of organizations, so if you've bounced around, they would be more useful. Also, THE doesn't handle unicode very well, so that presents a decreasing window for application as unicode becomes more wide spread.
Meanwhile, The Hessling Editor, continues to be downloaded from SourceForge and has active forums.
Vim does it , with netrw (ships with vim natively) , just press the i key a few times to change netrw’s layout to tree view
Just change netrw’s config file to default to the tree view and then add a line in your vim to open netrw by default in a visual split for your project’s root directory.
I have the classic GUI-style control key combinations (^Z,X,C,V,F, etc.) so deeply in my fingers that I inevitably try to use them everywhere, appropriate or not, and Micro does the right thing with them. Super intuitive (Ctrl+Arrows to jump words) and/or mnemonic (Ctrl+T for Tab) for the usual text-editor features. A good selection of power feature like Sublime-ish multiple cursors and a scriptable command line. Mouse integration just works in X. Hooks xclip or xsel to integrate with the system clipboard. Etc.
And (being written in go), it's super easy to make static binaries and/or cross-compile to drop on machines which are fucked or you have limited access to or the like. Eg. if you need an editor on some random embedded ARM Linux box, you can'env GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm CGO_ENABLED=0 make' and a few seconds later you have a binary to drop there.