● Micro Controls

483 2026-08-06 note ♑︎ ♎︎

MicroAn old ThinkPad, wiped down to headless Ubuntu Server: no desktop environment, no display manager, boots straight to a login prompt over SSH or a bare tty. The single purpose is longform writing, a novel draft, a poetry chapbook, a… is the editor for plain prose on the writerdeck. No modal states to fight, every binding is a Ctrl or Alt shortcut you'd expect from a GUI editor. Everything below is rebindable via ~/.config/micro/bindings.json, but the defaults great as-is.

The command bar (Ctrl-e) is the escape hatch for anything not bound to a key, typing help keybindings there lists every default. Ctrl-g opens the same help inside the editor, and Alt-g overlays a live key-menu at the bottom of the screen for whatever's rebound.

Advanced

Multiple cursors edit in parallel, useful for renaming a repeated word across a manuscript without a find-and-replace pass.

Macros record a sequence of edits and replay it: Ctrl-u starts and stops recording, Ctrl-j plays back the last one. Ctrl-b drops into ShellMode, running a shell command with micro suspended, output pipes back into the buffer.

The plugin manager runs from the command bar: plugin install <name> and plugin list pull from micro's official channel, though the writerdeck stays on stock micro, no plugins, one less thing to sync.

For the fonts used, see Monospace FontsA collection of favorite monospace typefaces designed for coding, terminal applications, and technical writing. These fonts prioritize legibility at small sizes and character disambiguation for programming environments. Programming Fonts with Ligatures Fira Code Monospaced font with ligatures for common programming…. For the setup this editor lives on, see WriterdeckAn old ThinkPad, wiped down to headless Ubuntu Server: no desktop environment, no display manager, boots straight to a login prompt over SSH or a bare tty. The single purpose is longform writing, a novel draft, a poetry chapbook, a…, and WordGrinder ControlsWordGrinder hides its menu by default, Esc or a right-click brings it up, and every command lives somewhere in there. The shortcuts below skip the menu entirely, all of them are also visible next to their matching menu entry if… for the other half.