Micro help text

Micro is a terminal-based text editor that aims to be easy to use and intuitive, while also taking advantage of the full capabilities of modern terminals.

Usage

Once you have built the editor, simply start it by running micro path/to/file.txt or simply micro to open an empty buffer.

Micro also supports creating buffers from stdin:

$ ifconfig | micro

You can move the cursor around with the arrow keys and mouse.

Keybindings

These are the default keybindings, along with their actions.

Editor bindings

Ctrl-q: Quit
Ctrl-e: Execute a command
Ctrl-g: Toggle help text
Ctrl-b: Run a shell command

Buffer bindings

Ctrl-s: Save
Ctrl-o: Open file
Ctrl-z: Undo
Ctrl-y: Redo
Ctrl-f: Find
Ctrl-n: Find next
Ctrl-p: Find previous
Ctrl-a: Select all
Ctrl-c: Copy
Ctrl-x: Cut
Ctrl-k: Cut line
Ctrl-v: Paste
Ctrl-u: Half page up
Ctrl-d: Half page down
PageUp: Page up
PageDown: Page down
Home: Go to beginning of file
End: Go to end of file
Ctrl-r: Toggle line numbers

The buffer bindings may be rebound using the ~/.config/micro/bindings.json file. Each key is bound to an action.

For example, to bind Ctrl-y to undo and Ctrl-z to redo, you could put the following in the bindings.json file.

{
    "CtrlY": "Undo",
    "CtrlZ": "Redo"
}

Possible commands

You can execute an editor command by pressing Ctrl-e followed by the command. Here are the possible commands that you can use.

quit: Quits micro.
save: Saves the current buffer.
replace "search" "value" flags: This will replace search with value. The flags are optional. At this point, there is only one flag: c, which enables check mode which asks if you'd like to perform the replacement each time

Note that search must be a valid regex. If one of the arguments does not have any spaces in it, you may omit the quotes.
set option value: sets the option to value. Please see the next section for a list of options you can set.
run sh-command: runs the given shell command in the background. The command's output will be displayed in one line when it finishes running.

Options

Micro stores all of the user configuration in its configuration directory.

Micro uses the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/micro as the configuration directory. As per the XDG spec, if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set, ~/.config/micro is used as the config directory.

Here are the options that you can set:

colorscheme: loads the colorscheme stored in $(configDir)/colorschemes/option.micro

default value: default Note that the default colorschemes (default, solarized, and solarized-tc) are not located in configDir, because they are embedded in the micro binary

The colorscheme can be selected from all the files in the ~/.config/micro/colorschemes/ directory. Micro comes by default with three colorschemes:
- default: this is the default colorscheme.
- solarized: this is the solarized colorscheme (used in the screenshot). You should have the solarized color palette in your terminal to use it.
- solarized-tc: this is the solarized colorscheme for true color, just make sure your terminal supports true color before using it and that the MICRO_TRUECOLOR environment variable is set to 1 before starting micro.
tabsize: sets the tab size to option

default value: 4
syntax: turns syntax on or off

default value: on
tabsToSpaces: use spaces instead of tabs

default value: off
autoindent: when creating a new line use the same indentation as the previous line

default value: on
ruler: display line numbers

default value: on
gofmt: Run gofmt whenever the file is saved (this only applies to .go files)

default value: off
goimports: run goimports whenever the file is saved (this only applies to .go files)

default value: off

Any option you set in the editor will be saved to the file ~/.config/micro/settings.json so, in effect, your configuration file will be created for you. If you'd like to take your configuration with you to another machine, simply copy the settings.json to the other machine.

In the future, the gofmt and goimports will be refactored using a plugin system. However, currently they just make it easier to program micro in micro.

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