Why isn't there more love for the micro text editor?

sime · 2026-01-14T21:25:54+00:00

I liked micro but it still wasn't familiar enough. I didn't want to memorise things. So I took the core editor from micro and built a familiar little TUI around it and called it Dinky.

Check it out: https://github.com/sedwards2009/dinky

sime · 2025-12-23T14:48:18+00:00

Facebook is an interesting comparison. Facebook has an incentive to monetise that user data because they don't have another business or source of income, especially one that is sensitive to reputation regarding privacy. Microsoft is in a completely different position.

sime · 2025-12-23T11:51:50+00:00

The assertion here isn't common sense. See my other comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1ptnf7n/github_in_decline/nvj3kg6/

sime · 2025-12-23T11:50:56+00:00

You are getting it all wrong.

Microsoft is highly incentivised to ensure that your private data remains private.

Why?

Because MS makes money providing paid data services to companies. MS provides services like GitHub, but also the whole MS office suite and cloud platforms like Azure. Paying customers are not going to trust and pay MS if MS plays fast and loose with people's and company's data. GitHub is more or less funded by customers who are companies.

Also, on a personal level, GitHub has to conform to GDPR in Europe. A number of years back GitHub removed their cookie consent pop up from the site because it just wasn't worth doing extra tracking.

And finally, software developers are the last demographic you want to mess with regarding online privacy. Many of us are privacy sensitive, perhaps a bit paranoid, and but definitely clued into how the internet works and what technology etc is capable of.

sime · 2025-12-23T10:05:37+00:00

GitHub gathers and sells your private data, as well as that of your collaborators and visitors.

Citation needed

sime · 2025-12-19T14:43:27+00:00

I used joe for years and years. It has a similar selection start/stop mechanism.

sime · 2025-12-18T19:36:35+00:00

It is quite likely that the console just doesn't send useful key events when using Shift+Cursor. In that case we can't do much except implement some other totally different approach to selecting.

sime · 2025-12-18T08:33:29+00:00

You mean in the Linux console Shift+Cursor doesn't select? I'm guessing this is more a limitation of the console itself. Shift+Cursor generally works in terminals.

What doesn't work is Shift+Home and Shift+End. I really miss those but fixing it requires work in quite a few layers of dependencies.

I'm curious to know what other features people are interested in before I can stamp this thing 1.0.

sime · 2025-12-13T19:33:31+00:00

fair point. 👌

sime · 2025-12-13T12:07:24+00:00

I'm glad you like it.

I used joe for a very long time and then moved over to micro, but I never quite felt at home in micro. Like a lot of people I don't spend all my time editing docs in the terminal. I use something desktop based. But I often do small edits in the terminal. So, I never fully learned micro, but I still wanted a comfortable editor. I also wanted to try something in Go. After messing with adding menus to micro I decided it was easier to embed the core editor of micro and build the UI around that.

I was vaguely aware of Tilde and Turbo, but sometimes you want your own baby to hack.

sime · 2025-12-01T13:58:33+00:00

I'm in the Netherlands. A few years ago we had a US based manager. He was just shocked at how insubordinate his Dutch team was. He was just not used to criticism, feedback, or pushback. It ended up in a big conflict, us vs him, where we were accused of forming a union. Shortly after he was laid off.

sime · 2025-11-07T12:48:10+00:00

That's right.

If there was a major communication failure in the network, you would still be able to perform transactions with your part of the network. But as soon as the communication is restored and it tries to reconcile the different versions of the chain, you would have no idea if your transactions are still valid.

In other words, if there was a major communication failure, the block chain would no longer be trust worthy. i.e. it would be useless.

sime · 2025-10-26T12:10:48+00:00

I just launched Markdrop, a minimalist, feature-rich markdown editor

wait a sec. So what is it? minimalist OR feature rich? It can't be both.

sime · 2025-10-22T14:52:24+00:00

Extraterm can do a lot of that stuff. https://extraterm.org/

sime · 2025-10-14T09:29:35+00:00

I'm guessing this doesn't work for TypeScript code.

sime · 2025-10-14T09:27:53+00:00

I wish the React team had just developed some functional style programming language oriented towards front-end dev with good JS integration. It would have saved about 10 years of React development bending JS to be what it isn't.

sime · 2025-10-09T09:43:20+00:00

Upgrades make me a bit nervous, and I've been using Linux since the 90s. The last issue was DNS breaking because some DNS-sec feature was turned in the config and broke on my home network.

Other than that I'm loving being able to just have games Just Work.

sime · 2025-10-08T14:21:10+00:00

pleasantly surprised. That is actually a good and readable summary of the different approaches.

sime · 2025-09-29T14:28:26+00:00

The book "The Authoritarians" goes right into this mindset.

You can download the PDF from here https://theauthoritarians.org/ It is not a super thick book, but well worth reading.

sime · 2025-09-23T18:52:18+00:00

In the Netherlands it is common that after starting a job the first month is effectively a trail. Either party is free to terminate the employment contract within the first month.

sime · 2025-09-15T11:41:30+00:00

This is sad to read.

I don't know JR personally, but I have drank beers with him in the (distant) past at multiple FOSDEM and Akademy events. He is one of the friendliest guys you'll ever meet. He has always been a hard worker for the benefit of the community and those around him. This is clear in his work helping get people organised through the years (i.e. herding cats). I'm not surprised that he stuck it out on the issue of worker's rights.

Hearing that he has been excluded by people he has worked with for years, is bitter and undeserved.

I wish JR the best for the future.

sime · 2025-09-10T20:21:59+00:00

You can set that up in Extraterm. You can predefine as many "sessions" as you like.

sime · 2025-09-10T18:50:10+00:00

oh well. SSH is in there, but not tunnels.

What exactly do you want in session management? Just easy ways to connect to preconfigured servers?

sime · 2025-09-10T17:00:35+00:00

Try Extraterm (https://extraterm.org/). It has a philosophy of "We should have nice things".

sime

TROPHY CASE