HACKER Q&A
📣 mdwalters

Is Micro a Viable IDE?


I just tried micro, and I was blown away with how feature packed it is, it could do almost anything VSCode can do, but with a small memory footprint.

Do you think micro is a viable IDE? What's your experience with these kinds of text editors?

  👤 eternityforest Accepted Answer ✓
Micro, the CLI editor? Does it have a debugger? How is the IntelliSense equivalent if any? Is the language server protocol support any good? How smart is the autocomplete?

I suspect there's a catch somewhere, but trying to set up a CLI editor for feature parity with VS Code seems like hours of plugin tinkering, so I don't have the experience to know what it is.

VS code is so big I'm not actually sure I know the full set of features I use off the top of my head, making a list might be a similar kind of challenge to listing all the physical items around the house I use regularly. With really subtle UI features you might not think of it till it's missing, or you might never miss it at all, or you might even be glad it's gone.

Is it actually possible to know a priori if a tool is viable without using it? One can sometimes easily tell if something is not a tool they want to use, but there's lots of stuff that might be ok or might have hidden issues, which might or might not matter depending on what features you need.