sl-site/tips/micro.md

title	date	description
Micro Editor	2021-04-06	Editing code in a shell without going insane with Micro.

There's a couple of options available when it comes to editing code on a tilde like South London. The first ones that come to mind are probably nano, vim/vi/neovim and emacs. I usually end up using vim or nano if I have something quick to edit like a config file, but editing whole scripts and things is where they start to be a bit frustrating. Micro is an excellent editor that you can install quickly and makes your life a lot easier with mouse support and sane keyboard shortcuts.

Install

Firstly, we need somewhere to install Micro, so lets make a folder at ~/.local/bin.

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cd ~/.local/bin

Now lets run the install script. You should inspect the contents before running by just leaving the bash command off the end.

curl https://getmic.ro | bash

The installer script should automatically detect your architecture and operating system and download the relavent version to the folder that you are in.

Finally, we need to tell our shell that we have programs installed in ~/.local/bin that we want to use. We can do that by adding the following line to the bottom of the ~/.bashrc file.

# other things...

export PATH="${PATH}:~/.local/bin"

Usage

Now that we've got Micro installed, simply run micro with a filename to open a file.

micro ~/public_html/index.html

You have the regular keyboard shortcuts you'd expect like CTRL + O and CTRL + S for open and save respectively.

You can use CTRL + E to run editor commands like these useful ones:

• help: get help on how to use the editor
• open /path/to/file: open a file
• save: save the opened file
• vsplit /path/to/file: split the editor vertically, opening the given file in the new split (CTRL + W to switch between splits, CTRL + Q to close the split)
• hsplit /path/to/file: same as a vertical split, but you guessed it, horizontal instead
• set <option> <value>: configure the editor, see below for some useful options

Useful options

• set clipboard internal: this either needs to be set to terminal or internal as we'll be using Micro over SSH, otherwise if you installed it on your local computer, you'd set this to external. internal just keeps the copy and paste buffer inside the editor rather than copying to your system clipboard which I found a bit janky with terminal
• set colorscheme darcula: this sets the theme that is used for syntax highlighting. Use the command help colors to see the other themes that are available
• set diffgutter true: this shows a little colour indicator on the line number gutter to whether you have added/updated/removed lines, useful for if you are working with git.