For years, developers thought that someday, someone would create a text editor after Pico, Nano, and Micro named Milli. Someday is today.
milli is a modern, lightweight terminal text editor built to bridge the gap between absolute simplicity and powerful usability. It honors the metric naming tradition by scaling down complexity while scaling up developer experience.
| Editor | Scale | Era | Core Philosophy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pico | 1992 | Bundled, basic email text editing. | |
| Nano | 1999 | The open-source, omnipresent terminal default. | |
| Micro | 2016 | Modern terminal editing with mouse & modern shortcuts. | |
| Milli | Today | Native Windows terminal power editing. |
- Native Windows API - Built entirely on Windows console buffers for smooth, standalone terminal performance.
- Mouse Text Selection - Native support for dragging to select text ranges and clicking to place your cursor.
- Deep Edit History - Built-in multi-level undo and redo tracking up to 500 steps of code modifications.
- UTF-8 Support - Seamlessly reads and writes standard UTF-8 text with local wide-character conversion.
- No-Config Interactive Help - Full offline interactive controls and documentation dashboard built right inside the terminal screen.
milli is written in standard C++ and interfaces directly with the Win32 API. You can compile it using g++ (via MinGW) or MSVC.
# Get it from WinGet:
winget install Githy912.MilliOr:
Download the milli.exe from the repository and add it to PATH, or if you are a developer, download the main.cpp and main.hpp and compile using MinGW:
g++ -std=c++20 -O2 -Wall -Wextra main.cpp -o milli.exemilli [filename]
# OR
milliCtrl + S- Save current file (or opens Save As menu)Ctrl + Q- Exit editor cleanly and restore standard terminal statesCtrl + H- Toggle full interactive screen help / Controls directory
Ctrl + Z- Undo last text modificationCtrl + Y- Redo last undone actionCtrl + A- Select entire file bufferCtrl + Alt + C- Copy selected text range to the Windows clipboardCtrl + Alt + Shift + C- Copy current line to the Windows clipboardCtrl + V- Paste clipboard string contents at cursor location
Ctrl + Backspace- Delete previous full word blockCtrl + Delete- Delete next full word blockHome/End- Instantly snap cursor to line boundsPage Up/Page Down- Page navigation leaps across the document
The metric scale doesn't stop here. Contributions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request to help make milli even better.