A "Fresh" New Terminal Text Editor (Better Than Nano!)

So today I want to share with you a fantastic piece of free and open- source software. This is a terminal text editor, which I know we've got a lot of free and open- source software, terminal text editors, right? We've got things like Nano and Micro and even MSEdit, but this one is really impressive because it's a rather new project, but in the little bit of time I've spent with it, I'm really impressed with Fresh, a terminal text editor that you can just use. So, it's designed to be rather simple, but yet at the same time, I found it to be a really neat little terminalbased text editor. Now, on Arch Linux, I was able to find fresh in the AUR, install the fresh-editor package from the AUR. If I switch over to a new workspace, let me open something in fresh. So, I'll fresh my bashrc. And we are in the fresh editor. Let me zoom in a little bit here. So, some of the things that make Fresh really neat are the fact that it uses standard KUA key bindings, common user access key bindings. So, one of my complaints with Nano is the weird key bindings that Nano uses that are not really like they're not EMAC bindings, they're not Vim bindings and they're not KUA bindings. It's its own thing and it really confuses the hell out of me every time I have to use Nano. But because fresh just uses your standard like Ctrl + C to copy, Ctrl +V to paste, Ctrl A to select all, Crl S to u save, Ctrl F to do a search. For example, here in my bash RC, I can search for alias and I can go down to this uh line here that contain the string alias. Another cool thing about Fresh is it has full mouse support. So even though we're in a terminal, I mean, I can select a block of text with the mouse. I also can actually use the mouse just to navigate the menu system up here. So you can do all that you want to do with the mouse or strictly with the keyboard as well. One really cool keybinding here is control E. Control E pulls up the file explorer is what they call it. It's just basically just your uh file manager. It's a split file manager where you can navigate to other files. Maybe instead of my bash RC, maybe I want to go and also edit my ZSH RC. I just click on it with the mouse here, right? And now we're in the ZSHRC file. Now, I still have my bash RC in a buffer. I'm looking at my ZSHRC here in this buffer, but if I want to go between them, I can do next buffer previous buffer here in the menu system. Or with the key bindings, control and page up and page down. So, if I do control page down, I go to my bash RC. If I do control and page up, I go back to the ZSHRC. And again, full mouse support. I could just click between them with the mouse here, the tabs here at the top of the split. Now, that control E to open the file explorer here. Once you open it, it's open all the time. And then you can control E to get back in it or control E to get back in the document you're working with. You also have some customization options here in the menu. For example, if you wanted to turn off line numbers, I could get rid of the line numbers if I don't need to see them. I could also turn on and off uh line wrap. I could turn off the mouse support also if I wanted to. Now, for me, I want to have the line numbers and the line wrap on and the mouse support. I want all of this stuff set, but you can also select themes as well. Let's actually take a look at the themes. Right now, we're using high contrast, but let's go to dark. And oh, yeah, that's fine, too. If I go back and select another theme, was that all I had was the four. I'm sure there's probably plugins to get other themes as well, but right now we have dark, light, high contrast, and nostalgia. If I go to nostalgia, that's [laughter] like a old school uh it reminds me of a lot of Incurs programs from back in the day. So, let's actually go back. I'm actually I actually like the dark. I think I'll just rock with that for now. Now, one of the things about Fresh is if I go back to their GitHub and look at the languages, you can see it is written in Rust. It's a Rust program. And uh what does that mean? Well, I don't know. I'm not a programmer, but I do know that they claim that this is a very very fast editor that can handle really large files, like files, you know, many gigabytes in size, has low input latency, and I I will say it's very fast. And some of what I've been uh playing around with it, it's really uh quite performative, right? Like I I really like this editor. So much so I mentioned a few months back when I took a look at MSEit from Microsoft that I thought, you know, I think a lot of Linux distributions should probably consider swapping out Nano for MSEdit because a Nano is such a bad text editor, right? If you don't want to use Vim, which is almost always on a Linux system. If you're looking for like a standard plain text editor, Nano not my favorite. You know, I thought MSEdit would be a nice alternative because it is free and open source software, but I know a lot of people are against that because it's made by Microsoft. Well, here's another alternative. This fresh editor, I think, is really, really nice. Some of the neat things that you can do. If I uh just click on the word export here, it highlights every instance of export in the document. You know, if I click on if, I get all the ifs, right? So, this is kind of cool. Also, one neat thing if you go into is it uh let me see is it edit? No, it's not edit. It's view. We go into keybinding style that we have default, Emacs and VS Code. And I think default and VS code are the same. But if I switch over to EMAC, no longer am I using like standard U kind of key bindings. I can actually do now controll N for next. That's a standard EMAC uh GNU Emacs heat binding. Crl P would go up. And then you have things like uh for example control E to go to the end of the line, control A to go to the beginning of the line. For me, I would prefer actually having Vim bindings rather than the standard GNU Emacs bindings. But if you're a EMAC user, specifically somebody that uses the standard EMAC bindings, that's a nice touch. And maybe they'll eventually add the uh VI/VM bindings as well. Maybe they just haven't got around to it yet. That's probably the case because again, this project is rather new. according to their GitHub. You know, I don't think the project's more than a couple of months old. I'm going to go back to the default key bindings. That way, I can just use standard, you know, ka kind of uh bindings here. Some other things you have in here, if you go back to the menu and go to view, you can split vertically if you want to. You can also split horizontally as well. So, you do have splits available if you want to work between two documents rather than having to switch between two different tabs, two different buffers. Now, when it comes to learning all of the key bindings for various things, if you go to help and go to keyboard shortcuts, you will open up this buffer here, which is a list of all the available key bindings. And you can see it's a rather exhaustive list. Some of them are self-explanatory, but many of them are not. So spend a little time learning the keyboard shortcuts if you do install Fresh. Now for those of you that want to use Fresh as a IDE, you probably are going to want LSP, which is a language server uh support. So for various programming languages that you work in. Now let's actually I'm actually going to quit out of this. Q to quit should uh discard and uh quit out of all of that. And let me actually do a fresh. And I'm going to open the fresh config which is at my home directory slash.config /fresh/config.json. And let me open that. And this is the uh config file. And you'll notice we get syntax highlighting now. And uh we got some nicities here in JSON that we didn't have in bash. And if I do arrf for find and let's do a search for lsp. We have this block here for LSP and for various languages. And if you want to actually enable LSP support for you know C++, C, HTML, yada yada yada. I don't work in most of these languages but maybe you know Python here you know Python the command is psp. So on Arch Linux what you would want to do if I open a terminal me clear the screen here you want to run the command um here sudo Pac-Man. Oh, I'm zooming in on the wrong terminal. s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s p s pseudo pacman- s python-lsperver. And that would get us the uh the package for the Python lsp. Matter of fact, let's actually take a look at a Python file. So, let me control Q to quit out of this and let me up arrow and I'm going to go into uhconfig/qile because qile has a config.py. And let's take a look at what Python looks like here in fresh. And you can see looks quite beautiful, right? Nice syntax highlighting here. If I hover over something, you know, we get this uh little popup here. So, it looks like the Python LSP is working just fine here. Yeah. So, overall, I've got to say uh to the creator of Fresh Editor, job well done for a rather new project to already be uh well on its way. I I could easily use this as a plain text editor if you know if I wanted to use a standard uh ka like text editor something like I don't know uh the Microsoft notepad or something like that or gnome's gedit. Now, for me, obviously, I want a modal editor like Vim or these days, of course, I use evil mode and Emacs. So, this is not something I would spend a lot of time in, but I know many of you guys are not into those extremely extensible editors like Vim or Emacs. And if you're looking for something rather simple that has some functionalities, the LSP, it has the file tree. I mean, you could certainly use this as a lightweight IDE. Give Fresh Editor a try. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Matt Steve, 40 millimeter, Capcave Man, Darloff, Lee, Jersey Killer, Mark Methos, Erion, Paul, Peace, Arch and Fedor, Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland War, and Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at the Fresh editor would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like the Fresh Editor, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.

Fresh is a terminal text editor you can just use. It's lightweight, fast and easy to learn. It includes features such as tabs, splits, LSP support and a file tree! REFERENCED: ► https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/ WANT TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL? 💰 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/distrotube 💳 Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MW3ZFGS8Q9JGW 🛍️ Amazon: https://amzn.to/2RotFFi 👕 Teespring: https://teespring.com/stores/distrotube DT ON THE WEB: 🕸️ Website: http://distro.tube 📁 GitLab: https://gitlab.com/dwt1 🗨️ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@distrotube 👫 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistroTube/ 📽️ Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DistroTube:2 FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT I LIKE: 🌐 Brave Browser - https://brave.com/ 📽️ Open Broadcaster Software: https://obsproject.com/ 🎬 Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org 🎨 GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/ 💻 VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ 🗒️ Doom Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!