The editor's author says Go's ecosystem of libraries is beneficial for users Micro, a text editor written in Google’s Go language, has reached its 1.0 release status, with its primary developer positioning it as a follow-up to the Nano editor. A cross-platform terminal-based editor, open source Micro offers a Lua-based plugin system that enables users to enhance the editor without having to change source code and recompile. “As the name indicates, Micro aims to be somewhat of a successor to the Nano editor by being easy to install and use in a pinch,” primary developer Zachary Yedidia said. Achieving 1.0 status this week means the editor is now stable, and there will be no new breaking changes. A subsequent 1.0.1 release also has been issued to fix some bugs. Yedidia decided to write Micro’s core with Go because he found a Go-based terminal user interface library called Tcell that offered capabilities lacking in other libraries, such as portability and true color. “Go also has a large ecosystem of libraries, including static linking and easy binary embedding, allowing users to have everything they need for Micro in the one binary file they download,” Yedidia noted. Improvements planned for Micro include autocompletion, multiple cursors, soft wrap, and better performance on Windows. Micro recently gained documentation, multiple views, custom bindings, tabs to spaces, and some optimization. It offers binaries for MacOS X, Windows, and Linux as well as for some BSD variants, including FreeBSD. “Also, it’s worth emphasizing that for all these different platforms, users can just download the binary and run it without needing to install Go on their computer,” Yedidia, said. Software DevelopmentDevelopment Tools