 So it's pretty well known that I'm a Vim guy and I have been a Vim guy for probably Four years now I started Vim Probably about a year after I started using Linux and I will not say that I'm really good at them I'm horrible at them. I've gotten way better, but I'm still really really bad at it Like notoriously bad like every time I do a racing video or something where I'm spending some time in Vim on camera There's always someone in the comment that says Matt this you can do this way easier by doing whatever whatever in Vim and Like a lot of times I know that trick that they've told me in the comments But I just forgotten about it or don't use it or for some reason Whatever or I didn't know about it because there's so much to them And I'm convinced that nobody knows everything about them probably even the person who created them I'm assuming there are some things in there that have kind of gotten forgotten about Over the last probably 20 years or so the point is is that I'm Vim guy I'm very much a person who enjoys Vim so much so that I make fun of people who use nano and emacs Those are just things that I do so I Shouldn't do those things because you can use whatever you like to use and I'm sure that people who use nano Feel very efficient when they use nano and those people who use emacs love playing Tetris so much So that they've decided that they need a text editor that can play Tetris I'm sure all those things are true, and I shouldn't judge them I do judge them, but I shouldn't do that and I know that that's a personal flaw of mine All that being said all that lead up leads us to the fact that there are other text editors out there that I Either haven't tried or haven't tried enough in order to give an opinion on and one of those text editors is called micro Now micro has been described to me as a better version of nano now I don't think it has to try very hard to be better than nano, but that's just my personal opinion coloring everything So I should hold that stuff back and actually try micro So I've been asked several times to try micro and I finally did I've spent three or four hours today Messing around with micro so I can't say that I'm an expert on it I probably never will be but I do have some thoughts and some things that I like and some things that I dislike So what I thought I'd do today is take a look at the micro text editor and compare it a little bit with my beloved Vim Let's go ahead and jump in So here we are in a terminal and in order to get to micro we just type in micro now This is what micro looks like and out of the box it is a Fine-looking text editor. It has numbers along the side It has a status bar along the bottom and it has a couple short cut keys along the side here underneath my head that it kind of tells you how you need to do stuff if you need some help and That's a good thing because out of the box There are some things that you're going to need to know in order to actually use this thing So things like control G will get you to the help page It'll bring up a split that has all of the help that you'll need now I'm gonna start off this entire Mini first look first impressions thing with something negative I almost always start with the negative things because those are the things that kind of stay in my head throughout the entire time I'm using it and the biggest negative for nano at least for me is that their documentation is not all that good it has Fairly good documentation in terms of like key bindings and stuff like that So if you do control e and then type in help Default keys it will show you a list of key bindings that you'll need to know So if all you ever need for help is what the key bindings are it does a fairly good job It's when you get into the commands and stuff like that that is a little bit lacking But my biggest complaint about it is that there it's not a codified Help system so you have to know that the default keys thing exists So you have to read that initial page which is not a big deal But it also has a tutorial it has a command section It has an option section Everything is in its own little place and you have to know those things exist and you have to navigate to them What I would really prefer is a man page. So if you do man micro Yeah, get nothing. There's absolutely no man page. There's no man dash dash help. That is all that really all that helpful It does have a few things here But it definitely doesn't show you everything that you could possibly know and it's just the basic help Section with some flags and stuff. It doesn't have the documentation. Even if there wasn't a man page I'd like it if there was a website or something that had all of the documentation on it I couldn't find that thing. They do have this tutorial here that is on github and it's not bad So if you do need to get to a all-in-one stop for some help This is a good place to do it, but it's still something that I had to search out in order to find It's not something that is readily available unless you know where to look for it So the documentation really is probably my biggest negative when it comes to micro But I wanted to get that out of the way so we can talk about some of the things that are positive because there are some things in Micro that I absolutely adore and I'm going to miss when I go back to them So let me talk about a few of those So the first thing that I really like about it is auto-save if I go back into micro So if I go into help and then options one of the first options that you see here is auto-save and what this will allow you to do is set up your text editor to automatically save every so many seconds and if you are a writer or a programmer Auto-save is something that you can quickly take for granted if you've ever used an IDE or a Markdown editor or something like that any my GUI editor almost all of them have some autosave functionality and If you get attached to that and then go into an editor that doesn't have it it can seriously cause you some problems because you expect things to auto-save and They didn't you lost all of that work. It can be disastrous now Most of that is going to be blamed on you because you should learn to save on yourself by yourself That should absolutely be the case always hit whatever save Keybinding that you have to save your own work You should definitely do that but auto-save in case you have a Situation where your computer crashes or you lose the electricity Hopefully that doesn't happen because I just not on some wood there the you know any situation where Maybe you were in between saves from you in between manual saves auto-saving is a really nice feature And I'm not sure if them has this functionality I think it does but I've never actually looked into it because well I'm lazy, but I don't remember it being default for sure So that's the first thing I like the next thing I like is that it has permanent editing of Options inside the editor and this is something that I know them does not have or at least it doesn't have it by default So if I wanted to set any of these options, I could do so right from the editor here And while you can set options in Vim from the command line or from the command Section at the bottom in Vim you can do that. They're only applicable for that buffer Once you've closed out of that buffer or closed Vim those settings go away and they get forgotten if you want to make permanent settings you have to go into your VMRC with Micro you can make any change you can set any of these options right here from the Command line or I call this thing in the command line with when you hit control E. You can do like set auto indent like so and then False you know if you wanted to and not only would that setting be changed for this buffer But it would also be saved to your dot config slash micro slash settings dot JSON file And that change would then be permanent until you changed it again, which is amazing It reminds me a lot of cube browser cube browser You can make any changes you want inside the browser and it will change it in the config file itself This does something similar which is really nice Another thing that I really like about micro is that it has way better copy and pasting out of the box in Vim Vim does not interact with your system clipboard at all unless you do some extra tweaking in order to get it to Actually do that out of the box micro will allow you to copy and paste anything you want So with the mouse just copy this and then hit control C and then it's in your keyboard buffer so I can go back up here and Hit control V and it pastes the thing that I copied that is Amazing and not only will it paste in the micro But also paste into Firefox or anything on the system because it actually uses your system clipboard and that means that there's no Extra things that you have to do in order to get that to work Which is very nice and kind of on top of all that you should just saw me do something that you would never see Anyone do invent and that is to take their mouse Highlight something hit control C go back up here with their mouse Hit control V The mouse is something that you don't use in Them you don't use it now you can set it up so that works But it's always kind of janky with micro the mouse is the first class citizen And while I don't think I prefer using the mouse It's definitely something that works really really well So the idea of being able to highlight the stuff that you want to copy and then copy it and then paste it is really nice And being able to put your cursor wherever you want with the mouse also really nice Obviously if you are a them master you can be very quick moving the cursor around with just keybindings A lot of people are I know I have gotten way better at that but a lot of people who are Mouse centric users of their computer would prefer a text editor that does really well with the mouse Micro is one of those so probably the thing that I'm most impressed with when it comes to micro is actually the theming Capability that it has so out of the box it comes with about 10 or 15 Themes or so some of them are duplicates and having to do with how many colors your terminal supports So there are three different versions of grab box or maybe two one of them's true color Which is like this this million color? Variant one of them is 256 colors you use whichever one will work with your terminal So it comes with several different themes right of the box, which is very nice However, the best part about this is that you can create your own themes now. You can create your own themes in Vim I don't want to hear anyways. Well, you can do that and then that's true But if anybody who's actually tried to make a theme in Vim from scratch, you will know that it is not easy So trying to figure out where each setting is actually going to be applied You have to know all this different Vim script and all this stuff It's not a easy process besides Vim has four different ways at least of theming something and you can use them interchangeably It's not a well documented process. It's just a mess when it comes to micro All it is is something that looks like this. That's 23 lines that encompasses an entire theme You use the color dash link to tell micro what you want to color So in this case the default color is going to be those numbers there If you want the comments to be a certain color You say the color dash link comment and then the color you want to be color dash link constant so on and so forth each one of those things is Especially to find what it is. It's easy to tell for the most part and you just give it a color code and that is Extraordinary, it's very very nice and you can create as many themes as you want They're just about 23 lines long and once you know what each of these Parts here actually apply to so under the line special type things like that It'd be very easy to create your own themes again Not something that you can easily do inside them Especially if you haven't ever dealt with them script or lore or any of that kind of stuff before one thing that I was surprised about when I heard about Micro is that it has several things that them kind of takes for granted. So things like splits is here So right now we're actually looking at a split. This is a horizontal split It also has vertical splits you can do the same thing So you do would do colon e to get into the command mode and then type in V split just like so and then you type in the file name of whatever you want And it would come as come up as a vertical split. So it has splits That's something that Vim has and I use quite often another thing that micro has that I didn't expect to have is tabs It has tabs so you can do control T and it opens up a new tab and Vim has tabs But you have to set them up in order to use them or you have to know the default key bindings Which you need means you need to go into the Vim Help system and try to find out what those things are which is not always an easy thing to do and the default key bindings for Vim tabs are all over the place. They're not very good So you have to kind of change those in order to make them good in order to get to a this Tabs here you can use your mouse if you want to you can switch between tabs with your mouse It's really nice There are key bindings obviously that you can use in order to go between tabs But using your mouse is you know what most people do to switch between tabs So the fact that it has tabs is awesome. The last thing that I really like about Micro is that it has an excellent list of key bindings So if again you search you do command E and then help and then default keys It will show you all the key bindings. This is the help page that you'll spend the most time on Because it has all the key bindings that you'll need to know in order to use this thing The thing is about the key bindings and I should mention this is that if you've ever used a word processor before You know a vast majority of these key bindings so things like control Q is for quit control s for save control f for find Page up page down moves you page up page down Control w if you're familiar with them is actually the first part of a key cord that gets you between splits in here It's just control w moves between splits and it goes on and on and on most of these key bindings are very very Self-explanatory and ones that you're probably familiar with from other word processors that don't have the VIM hang up of using the VIM keys for everything So if you are the type of person who doesn't want to go about learning all of the VIM stuff This is a good option for you No, let's talk a little bit about how this compares to nano I would say that saying this is a better version of nano is an insult to micro because nano is very very bare bones It can do some things. There is a configuration file for nano. I didn't know that until about six months ago or so I don't know anybody who uses it, but I'm sure there is someone but you can configure nano to do other things like set default Wrapping and stuff like that you can do that really easily But there's a lot of stuff that micro does that nano wishes it could do things like tabs things like splits things like a Plug-in support system, which I didn't even mention because I didn't really look at it But it exists right nano wishes it could do all these things So comparing it to nano not really all that fair because it doesn't really share all that much in common with nano Other than it doesn't use the VIM keys. I suppose that's one commonality So if we compare it to VIM then we're gonna come into some places where Micro really doesn't add up things like macro support. I don't know if it has macro support I did not find it anywhere in the documentation So I'm assuming that it does not have macro support So that's something that will definitely keep some people away the bifurcated all over the place documentation is Similar to VIM actually VIM has that too But at least if you want to you can find VIM's documentation online really easily and VIM does have a man page So you can go through some of the stuff in the man page Also comparing it to VIM it doesn't have VIM key support So if you are coming from VIM and coming here Get prepared to use the arrow keys because the arrow keys move around all the time either that or be prepared to use Your mouse both of those things are kind of an ethyma to every VIM user You don't use the arrow keys. You don't use your mouse and then you don't do those things in fact most people most Professional VIM users including me I suppose they actually disabled arrow keys. So you can't use them You'll get an error if you try to use them, especially if you're an insert mode It'll start putting in weird characters and shit, right? So that's what you do in VIM in micro you use the arrow keys all the time And if you're not prepared to do that, you're not gonna like micro So let's talk a little bit about the three things that I don't care for one of those things that is I talked about at the beginning the odd Documentation that is all over the place in the lack of Documentation outside of micro. I don't really care for that all that much. It is okay documentation It's not the best documentation. I've ever seen but it's sufficient It's good enough to get you going and the key bindings are so familiar to most people It's probably not going to be a big problem that there isn't a ton of documentation here But it does show you all the options that you need all the commands that are available The one thing that I couldn't get to work is search and replace it has a couple lines for how to do that But I couldn't figure it out. Maybe it was just because of odd placements of single quotation marks I'm not sure which ones you're supposed to use it does support regex for search and replace You can do that. It'll also support you supports regex for search So you can do that as well It also does the same thing that nano and vim both do all out of the box. They have this really weird wrapping by default so if you have a line here I'm gonna try to find a way to do this so we're just gonna type in some nonsense I mean, this is this this is really nonsense. You see how this wraps by default It's the same way nano does it and if you've ever used nano You can go when you go down to the next line or you go up to the next line You can see it just kind of runs off to the side for infinity and beyond. That's not good I hate that with a passion. It's one of the reasons why I hate nano. I can't stand it now I know you can change it you can change it in micro 2 but by default it does that and if it was just my Files like my files that I use that have all this stuff, you know, that's fine like I get it's not fine I don't like it, but it's in the help documentation too So there are places in the help documentation that run off into the side of the terminal and Unlike nano which if you ever use nano when something like this has a more stuff off to the side There's a little arrow that shows a there's more of this stuff here Jack ask go search for it You know press the arrow key and tell you get there with micro. There's no arrow here So you can be reading along and Unless you actually, you know move your cursor down here So it will move you to the end or if you're actually at the home if you actually have your cursor at the home position The first in the first line you have no way of knowing unless it just kind of reads weird that there's more stuff there Right. It's annoying and that should definitely not be the default. I hate it with a passion It's just so so bad It would actually honestly keep me from using micro because that one piece there would I have a specific way that text Wraps in Vim so that it will actually move on to the next line Just like you would if you were you know in a regular word processor because I would I used Vim for writing for Several months and I wanted wanted it to wrap properly. The thing is is that when you are Actually moving a file that was written in Vim that has that special ramp wrapping into a Text editor that doesn't do the wrapping it still considers all those paragraphs that you had very neatly wrapped in Vim as just one line So when I opened up some of my documents in micro that were Paragraphs in Vim it came across all those things as just one line here in micro and they all ran off into the side of the screen and it was not good So you definitely will want to change the wrapping in micro if you use this for anything that is going to be in terms of like Long lines, I suppose is how you'd say that so those are the things that I really really don't like about micro Listed a whole bunch of stuff that I did like so I think that I was fairly fair when it comes to actually using micro There are some things that I really really like that theming capability the ability to create your own themes really easily with no nonsense crap programming languages is Really really nice. I wish Vim had something like that and maybe there is something out there that I just don't know about I'm sure there are like Vim theme creators or something that I don't know about But the point is is that none of them are that simple if they even do exist and I really like that about micro the better mouse support I Think that I could get used to using my mouse in a text editor Yeah, I really do think I could could do that I'm not sure if I want to do that But I could the two things that would keep me from using this honestly as a day-to-day text editor is The lack of them keys. I really like the Vim keys. I don't want to have to use a mouse or anything like that Although I could probably get by without those. I know that they're working on adding Vim support So that's something to look forward to but the biggest thing is that Horrible horrible word wrapping that they have going on or lack of wrapping at all. I Couldn't stand that and even changing it would it just in the back of my mind I would know that that thing still that still exists and it would just not make me happy at all It made me feel a little bit dirty about using it to be honest with you The tab support though is fantastic and I really like the key bindings I mean, I like really really like the key binding so much so that I think I'm gonna go back into Vim and try to Copy some of the key bindings imagine being able to use control s to save instead of having to do command w That'd be kind of cool. I don't know if that I'd use it But it reminded me so much of when I used to use an office suite that it kind of made me happy again even though I hated using an office suite so It's those those types of things that you know kind of made me happy like control f the search is very nice It's so intuitive that I didn't even realize that it should be there because I didn't I was thinking it took I spent about 20 minutes searching for a command to search like because there's a command to replace right? There's a command to replace and you know search and replace But there's not a command to search because there doesn't need to be you hit control f it searches for you And that's the way it isn't pretty much every GUI application. I did not expect that to be here So I was quite happy with that too So there are some key baddies there that I'm probably going to try to use in them though I don't know why I probably never use them can so used to using slash for search and Control w or colon w to save Yeah, so I probably don't need to do that But I might do it anyway So that is micro if you have thoughts on micro you can leave those in the comment section below I know there's probably a ton of stuff here that I did not cover This was not a tutorial or a all-in-depth thing about micro I just want those very much my first impressions So if you have stuff in micro that you really like or if you've never used micro Maybe you were considering it leave those comments in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast You can follow me a masted on our odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube you guys are all Amazing people. I can't even I mean seriously just amazing amazing people. So thank you for your support I can't even begin to say how thankful and grateful I am. So thanks for that. Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time