Micro help text

Micro is an easy to use, intuitive, text editor that takes advantage of the full capabilities of modern terminals.

Micro can be controlled by commands entered on the command bar, or with keybindings. To open the command bar, press Ctrl-e: the > prompt will display. From now on, when the documentation shows a command to run (such as > help), press Ctrl-e and type the command followed by enter.

For a list of the default keybindings, run > help defaultkeys. For more information on keybindings, see > help keybindings. To toggle a short list of important keybindings, press Alt-g.

Quick-start

To quit, press Ctrl-q. Save by pressing Ctrl-s. Press Ctrl-e, as previously mentioned, to start typing commands. To see which commands are available, at the prompt, press tab, or view the help topic with > help commands.

Move the cursor around with the mouse or with the arrow keys. Enter text simply by pressing character keys.

If the colorscheme doesn't look good, you can change it with > set colorscheme .... You can press tab to see the available colorschemes, or see more information about colorschemes and syntax highlighting with > help colors.

Press Ctrl-w to move between splits, and type > vsplit filename or > hsplit filename to open a new split.

Accessing more help

Micro has a built-in help system which can be accessed with the > help command.

To view help for the various available topics, press Ctrl-e to access command mode and type in > help followed by a topic. Typing just > help will open this page.

Here are the available help topics:

tutorial: A brief tutorial which gives an overview of all the other help topics
keybindings: Gives a full list of the default keybindings as well as how to rebind them
defaultkeys: Gives a more straight-forward list of the hotkey commands and what they do
commands: Gives a list of all the commands and what they do
options: Gives a list of all the options you can customize
plugins: Explains how micro's plugin system works and how to create your own plugins
colors: Explains micro's colorscheme and syntax highlighting engine and how to create your own colorschemes or add new languages to the engine

For example, to open the help page on plugins you would run > help plugins.

I recommend looking at the tutorial help file because it is short for each section and gives concrete examples of how to use the various configuration options in micro. However, it does not give the in-depth documentation that the other topics provide.

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