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Fresh: a feature-packed, IDE-like terminal editor with tabs, markdown preview, syntax highlighting, and Git.
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Micro: a simple, Nano-like editor with modern keybindings, mouse support, and built-in syntax highlighting.
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Dinky is GUI-like with tabs and themes; Ne is keyboard-forward. Replace Nano with a modern alternative.
Even if you tend to avoid the Linux terminal, chances are, at some point, you will have to edit a text file within the terminal. By default, pretty much every Linux distribution uses the 'nano' text editor. It's entirely keyboard-driven and uses some old-school shortcuts from the 1990s. Those shortcuts are counter-intuitive for me and I just don't want to bother learning them anyway. I have two choices here: learn something like Vim, which would take even longer, or use a more modern alternative of 'nano.' I went with the second option and tested a lot of console text editors. These are my favorites.
Fresh
A fully-loaded IDE in your terminal.
The Fresh console editor feels like having a powerful notepad running inside the terminal. There are a lot of features to cover with this editor, but I'll list some of my favorite ones.
First off, the editor opens documents in tabs and supports every text format, including built-in markdown previews . You can open new files using the built-in file browser, which loads either with the keyboard shortcut or the File menu. On each tab, you can see line numbers, the file name, and a dynamic status bar that tracks where the cursor is (it does have mouse support on by default).
The standard shortcuts work for undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, select all, save, and quit. There's even a 'save as' button for saving text files in a particular format or with a different name. You can use different find and replace features, including jumping back and forth between text matches and replacing in selection. Most of the time, I'm just replacing or pasting text into files and saving them, which is a breeze with this editor. If you're used to Emacs or VSCode bindings, you can switch the default Fresh keybindings to use either of those too.
Fresh even has window multiplexing . Under the View tab, there are buttons to split the editor vertically or horizontally, you can view and work on different parts of a text file at the same time.
There are more goodies in Fresh too, even though I don't use them all. For example, you can change themes, add syntax highlighting for code (Fresh supports some 170 code languages) and integrate it with Git. With all these features, Fresh feels like Notepad++ or a similar lightweight IDE.
You can install Fresh on Arch via the AUR using a helper.
For Debian or Ubuntu systems, you can run this 'curl' command to download the .deb package and install it system-wide.
If Nano is too barebones for you and you'd like an editor that doesn't feel restrictive or ancient, give Fresh a try.
Micro
It's like Nano but built for this century.
Micro is a modern alternative to Nano, and I quite like it. Micro is the editor I use the most often, even though it's not as feature-packed as Fresh. I prefer Micro's simplicity.
The interface for Micro looks a lot like Nano's, except it uses modern keybindings, and you can use your mouse to make selections and jump the cursor. It even has built-in syntax highlighting, so when you're working with config files, it's easier to edit them with Micro.
To open a text file, you type 'micro' followed by the file's name and extension. Make sure you're in the correct directory, however.
You can make selections with the cursor, copy text with Ctrl+C, cut with Ctrl+X, paste with Ctrl+V, save with Ctrl+S, and quit with Ctrl+Q. It's much more intuitive than Nano's keybindings.
Micro is available in the official Arch repos, and you can install it directly.
On Debian and Ubuntu systems, you can install it directly using APT.
If the only thing that bothers you about Nano is its weird keybinding selection, Micro is everything you need.
Dinky
If notepad could live in the terminal
While Fresh is a fully-featured IDE in the terminal and Micro is just Nano with better keybindings and cursor support, Dinky falls somewhere between the two. It's simpler than Fresh but more GUI focused than Nano. If you've ever used Notepad on Windows, Dinky feels just like that, except in the terminal.
You can navigate and interact with the interface using a mouse. Dinky can open files in dedicated tabs and create new tabs with a single mouse click. All the standard keyboard shortcuts work here, and you can even access them from the TUI menu (especially helpful if you're trying to run find and replace commands.)
Dinky has built-in themes and excellent syntax highlighting.
You can build Dinky from the source or use the pre-built binaries for your system. The developer has provided two releases on the GitHub repo for ARM and x64 systems . I'm on a x64 machine, so I chose the 'dinky_linux_amd64.tar.gz' release. Right-click its link and copy it. We'll use ' wget ' to download this archive file. You can download it directly within the browser and manually navigate to the directory too.
Once that's done, extract the archive.
Now you can directly run Dinky from the extracted file like this:
If you want system-wide access, you can move it to the Bin folder. That way, you can access it like any other app from anywhere within the terminal.
Dinky is the perfect choice if you're used to classic notepad apps.
Ne
If Micro had a GUI
Micro has more modern features, but it has the same DNA as Nano. Ne, or the Nice Editor, shares its DNA with Micro and Nano, but it has even more features than Micro. It sits in a sweet spot because it doesn't alienate people who haven't worked with console editors, but it doesn't look or feel like your typical notepad or IDE .
By default, it has all the modern keybindings you'd expect from a text editor, and it has mouse support too. However, it encourages you to work with the keyboard and rely more on shortcuts. For example, the GUI menu bar is hidden by default, but you can surface it with Ctrl+Down Arrow. It's supposed to be more of a fallback feature, I think, because the default interface is pretty barebones, just like Nano or Micro. So when you get stuck and can't find the keyboard shortcut for something, you can try the GUI menu instead. Beyond that, there aren't any other features. You can't theme Ne, or open files in tabs, or load files in a beautiful TUI file explorer window. \\
Nice Editor is available via the official APT repos, so you can install it using the APT command:
You can install it on Arch systems using Pacman or AUR.
Choose Ne if you enjoy Nano's simplicity but still want the option to work with the mouse.
Unless you want to put in the time and effort to learn Nano keybindings, it'll just get in the way whenever you need to edit a file in the terminal. It's better to replace it with a modern alternative that works as you expect it to. Still, if you prefer Nano and want to stick with it, you can always edit its config file to replace the keyboard shortcuts with normal defaults.
