# Fresh terminal editor

37 Hacker News commenters recommended Fresh terminal editor and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Terminal editor with familiar GUI-style shortcuts, multi-cursor editing and LSP support, needing little learning. Critics note incomplete Windows mouse support and missing features.

## Why people recommend it

- Intuitive, needs little explanation (3 comments): "It's well thought, really intuitive so far and I definitively will use it regularly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140106)) "basically everything works intuitively and needs very little explanation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140845)) "main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511200))
- Familiar GUI-style shortcuts work (5 comments): "Fresh implements more standard keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl+ArrowLeft and Ctrl+ArrowRight to skip to the next and previous word" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143990)) "Thanks for this cool project ! I was desperate to find more modern terminal editors with CUA mode." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138392)) "these editors feel more like using GUI editor like sublime text for example. And that's nice." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667045))
- Multi-cursor and LSP work well (2 comments): "LSP is working but requires polish. Go to definition, completion suggestions, inlay type hints and symbol highlighting are all working" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46149909)) "The multi-cursor experience is the smoothest I've seen in a terminal based editor." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46141073))
- Fast, efficient, easy to install (2 comments): "It's an above-avg experience; a trivial install process, which isn't a given for OSS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48371213)) "especially the efficiency and speed (phenomenal!)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46145940))

## What people warn about

- Mouse and Windows support incomplete (3 comments): "On Windows 11 the mouse only moves to the start of a line, cannot select text at all" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46144226)) "it only supports mouse input when running in terminal emulator under X" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148520)) "Getting it to work properly on native Windows is a gap." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46144497))
- Missing features and documentation (2 comments): "It's a great start of course, but even just documenting anything that's clearly still missing would be helpful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163400)) "some are missing compared to what normally works" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143444))
- Code quality and binary size concerns (5 comments): "Incredible, the technical choice got overridden by popularity, leading straight to bloat" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46144994)) "extract_config_structs in build.rs does not, in fact, do what the comment says." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147399)) "so many commits authored by `claude` with 100+ lines each" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147433))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zed](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zed.md): 700 recommend
- [GNU Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/emacs.md): 648 recommend
- [Vim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vim.md): 513 recommend
- [Visual Studio Code](https://hackerapproved.com/p/visual-studio-code.md): 485 recommend
- [Neovim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neovim.md): 295 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Fresh terminal editor", https://hackerapproved.com/p/fresh-terminal-editor/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).