mg

This is a portable version of the Mg editor from OpenBSD.

Mg is intended to be a small, fast, and portable editor for people who can't (or don't want to) run emacs for one reason or another, or are not familiar with the vi editor. It is compatible with emacs because there shouldn't be any reason to learn more editor types than emacs or vi.

This repository aggressively tracks upstream.

Compiling

mg has a simple configure script that generates a POSIX Makefile.

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Dependencies

By default, you need the ncurses library.

NetBSD users will use the in-base NetBSD curses library.

If you do not have the ncurses library, you can call configure with the --with-builtin-curses flag to compile with a simplified version of the NetBSD curses library. In this setup, there are no dependencies other than the system's libc.

Single-user mode

When configured with --enable-static and --with-builtin-curses, the resulting mg binary can use used in single-user mode if placed in / or /bin or some other directory accessible in single-user mode.

mg can be invoked in single-user mode similar to:

$ TERM=vt100 mg

Testing

Tested on recent versions of Arch, Alpine, Cygwin, Debian, DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS X (10.4 or later), NetBSD, Slackware, and Ubuntu.

Licensing

Files originating from mg are Public Domain. Files needed for portability have their own individual license headers. All licenses are ISC or BSD.

Commonly asked questions

mg does not yet support UTF-8. If you would like to work on this, please reach out to the tech@ mailing list on OpenBSD.

Get a tarball

See the Releases tab on GitHub. The latest version is mg-7.0.