I am not a developer or system administrator and have never really come to terms with the editors vim or neovim. They are undoubtably configurable and efficient, but I do not use them enough to get to that "efficient" level. I am sure they would be great if you were using frequently, day in day out.

Nano is the go-to for many when they need to edit something quickly. The problem for me is that I have struggled to remember the shortcuts as they do not always seem logical, e.g. Ctrl+K to cut, Ctrl+U to paste.

Having looked around for a while I've moved towards using micro as a text editor. For me it has the right level of functionality and the shortcuts are more familiar to me, e.g. CTRL+s to save, CTRL+c to copy, CTRL+v to paste. You can even easily choose different themes.

While I have enjoyed using and learning micro, the biggest surprise I have had with the editor is that I was unable to copy text from micro into another external application. Apparently micro has its own internal clipboard for copying and pasting, which cannot be used outside the editor. I am currently using the Hyprland and Sway, which are window managers that use Wayland as a compositor. To get the copy & paste function to work, you will need to install an external clipboard manager, i.e. wl-clipboard. To do this on Arch:

sudo pacman -S wl-clipboard

With wl-clipboard installed some changes need to be made to the settings in micro. Using a text editor such as micro (!!) you can open and then edit the settings file. To open the file:

micro .config/micro/settings.json

Within the opened file, add between the { } brackets the following:

{
    "clipboard": "external"
}

My full settings file looks as follows:

{
    "colorscheme": "catppuccin-latte",
    "clipboard": "external",
    "softwrap": true
}

The only difference from the previous is that there is a comma at the end of the line, since it is not the end of the settings.