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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

Micro? really? a 11MB binary?

Yeah, "micro" for an editor would be 11 kilo bytes. I bet it's possible to do a half-decent editor in C in 11KB. Antirez's "kilo" (~1000 lines of C) is 36KB when compiled with standard gcc (https://github.com/antirez/kilo).

That said, for many server-type use cases these days, 11MB isn't a huge deal. Still, I wonder if micro could be compiled on / ported to TinyGo and end up a few hundred KB? It looks like TinyGo can produce some pretty small binaries: https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/optimizing-binaries/

>That said, for many server-type use cases these days, 11MB isn't a huge deal.

Yes but that doesn't make it a good candidate for a default editor that would be ubiquitous, from small embedded development stuff to servers to desktop.

I don't mind several MB when the tool offer more than the competition. But what are pico/nano lacking really when it comes to editing a few lines in a config file once in a while? It is not like micro is trying to replace visual studio code or emacs either. Or is it?

Seems like a really modern alternative to my 389K nano.

Micro should have been 389M then.

Well, it's written in Go, so...

Vim on my macbook is 5MB. Perhaps Micro can be optimized for smaller-sized binary?

On some linux distros (debian based) there is a im-tiny package smaller than the full blown vim.

Also historically vim was not the default vi clone installed, which was an optionnally installed package. The default was very often a smaller clone: elvis. Busybox as its own vi clone and most BSD OS are still providing nvi by default

11 Micro TB

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