I used to recommend micro[1] to people like those in the target audience of this editor. I wonder if that should change or not.
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The original edit.com, from around dos 6.22 (and later 7.0, ie. win95) was my first IDE. Well, I started with qbasic, so I was fairly familiar with it as it was similar (or same?), but when I started learning C/C++ with djgpp, I just continued using edit.com.
My "project file" was `e.bat` with `edit file1.cpp file2.cpp file3.cpp`, as it was one of the few editors that I knew that had a decent multi file support with easy switching (alt-1,2,3 ..). I still continue remapping editor keybindings to switch to files with alt/cmd-1,2,3,.. and try to have my "active set" as few of the first files in the editor
It wasn't a great code editor, as it didn't have syntax highlighting, and the indent behaviour wasn't super great (which is why in my early career had my indent was two spaces, as that was easy enough to do by hand, and wasn't too much like tab). But I felt very immediate with the code anyway.
I knew that many others used editors like `qedit`, but somehow they never clicked with me. The unixy editors didn't feel right in dos either.
Quickly trying this, it doesn't seem to switch buffers with the same keybindings, even if it does seem to support multiple buffers.
Geniunely curious, how projects like these get approved in an org at the scale of Microsoft? Is this like a side project by some devs or part of some product roadmap? How did they convince the leadership to spend time on this?
So many things I like about this!
First of all, an empty list of dependencies! I am sold! It works great. I can't believe the did a whole TUI just for this, with a dialogs a file browser. I want to use for a project of mine, I wonder how easy it is. If someone involve in the project is here, why not use Ratatui?
Code quality is top notch, can only say one thing:
Bravo!
About a month ago I heard Microsoft had their own Linux distribution to help Microsoft Windows users feel more at home. From memory, it was a rather simple GNOME setup. Nothing special.
I am surprised Micrsooft didnt use the opportunity to create a micrsoft specific Linux distro that replaces bash with powershell, or Edit with vim, nano and other choices as well as .NET and Visual Studio Code by developer installs.
Micrsoft could have used this as their default WSL install.
It may not have won the war against typical distro like Ubuntu or Debian but it could have gained a percentage and be a common choice for Windows users - and there are a lot of Windows users!
Microsoft cannot dominate the Linux kernel but it can gain control in userland. Imagine if they gained traction with their applications being installed by default in popular distributions.
This Microsoft Edit is available for Linux, like Powershell is and others. If they had played their cards right -- perhaps -- 10 years ago, their distribution could have been in the top 5 today, all because many windows users use it as their WSL.
Giant companies (like M$) can inject their fingerprints into my personal space. Now, we just need Micrsooft Edit to have Co-Pilot on by default...
This is just a "because I wanted to" project. And I get that; done a lot of those myself just to understand what the hell was going on. But the rewrite of turbo vision into FPC and compiling to half a dozen targets has been around for 20 years. Turbo vision is probably the best text mode windowing library in existence. The cool fun kicks in when you can map a whole text screen to an array like so: var Screen: Array[1..80,1..25] Of Byte Absolute $B800; // or something like that as i recall
What turbo vision brought to the game was movable, (non) modal windows. Basically a lot of rewriting that array in a loop. Pretty snappy. I made a shitload of money with that library.
Now I'm waiting for EDLIN but with unicode.
I remember you could use it in a batch file to script some kinds of editing by piping the keypresses in from stdin. Sort of a replacement for a subset of sed or awk.
I haven't tried but this should be possible with vi too. Whether that is deeply cursed is another question.
Fun. I must admit I don't really know who this is for, but it seems fun.
I appreciate the sense of humor coming from this project. F.ex. from the release note: "As Steve Ballmer famously said: Fixes! Fixes! Fixes!".
Refreshing to see employees can have fun in a multi billion dollar company.
Back in 1993, I would open up binary files in edit and enjoy seeing hearts.
I thought this might work with Enter-PSSession but it unfortunatelly produced Error 0x80070006: The handle is invalid.
Insane that we don't have TUI in remote session in 2025.
I'm just waiting for this thing to turn into an IDE like Turbo C 2.0 ( https://imgur.com/5vyPZdO ) I don't see why this shouldn't turn into a sophisticated code editor. I get that that's not the goal, but there's nothing else like it available -- all other text based editors do their own thing, completely ignoring the common-user interface as if it's a thing they've never heard of ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access )
Microsoft loves to own general terminology like "edit" for their products. I have no idea how this flys.
SqlServer like it's the one that found sql or it's the only product that serves sql.
I was hoping this would work over ssh in a macOS Terminal.app, but last I tried it was inserting all kinds of weird characters into the edited text files.
Windows ships an official OpenSSH server these days, but so far there haven't been any good official text editors that work over OpenSSH, as far as I know.
I've had to resort to "copy con output.txt" the few times I needed to put things into a text file over windows-opensshd...
It will take more than nostalgia and rust to tear me away from my neovim setup that has been built up/improved on over the years. Lsp, dap, autocompletion, aliases and bindings for each programming languages. Lazily loaded of course so it’s still snappy.
Manage configuration, and external dependencies such as lsps with nix.
Then have separate nix shells for each project to load tooling and other dependencies in an isolated/repeatable session. Add in direnv to make it more seamless development experience.
I love edit.
It was my favorite editor back in the old days.
It worked, did the basics really well and got the job done. Glad to see it’s back.
Discussion (271 points, 1 month ago, 185 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529
I do not understand the love this project is getting. It was a shit editor when it was introduced; we'd all started using something else years before.
I don't understand why they want to go with DLLs for scripting instead of WASM + wamr which is really small. Maybe I'm just really inexperienced in this space.
I came here assuming that this was a clone of Gemini CLI (which is a clone of Claude Code). Both pleased and disappointed to be wrong.
Fun project #1: Get the binary size comparable to EDIT.COM
Fun project #2: Port to MS-DOS (with DPMI)
Fun project #3: Port to 16-bit MS-DOS (runs on original 8086)
How long until it becomes Copilot 365 Edit?
fake. it's not blue.
> This editor pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor
Oddly, it looks more like Borland's editor.
The lengths people will go just to not have to learn Vim continues to surprise me.
oh, the memories. gorilla.bas :)
It's nice to see an editor that explicitly isn't an IDE and is more something like notepad. often when editing config files and the such, it's more convenient to use something like notepad than it is to use something like VSCode.
This editor doesn't have delusions of grandeur, it focuses on usability more than features. and it is better for it.
If you are a idea guy and want your idea real , all you have to make is a fency fake trailer anouncing it, then watch the company create it, the suits are this empty anyone external can powersteer those ghostships.
Maybe this makes up for them destroying Notepad for some people.
Do Edlin next.
Reminds me of my days on a support line.
"Type edit autoexec.bat....." etc
I love TUI's lately.
I just wish this was on nixpkgs
Nano is completely ok for this. Nope, let's burn some cash and reinvent the wheel.
Instead of donating to Nano devs, or hire some of them or something.
Stupid corp at their finest.
Any Flatpak or Snap editions?
story in the news already https://digitrendz.blog/newswire/technology/19460/microsoft-...
Can this be ported to MacOS?
Needs LSP and Tree-Sitter :)
No musl binary. For glibc Linux distributions only perhaps.
Was hoping for MS-DOS editor with built-in LLM.
Runs on Windows too! It has "Redo", not to be confused with "Undo Undo". Unfixed-width Tabs are a huge leap forward. LF, sans CR, will cut your file sizes in half.
Another Microsoft nerd-washing project.
Did anyone ask for yet another a Microsoft editor on your Linux machine?
Meanwhile, they forced AI Copilot bloat into Notepad, whose singular use-case was supposed to be that it does one thing well without unnecessary features.
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Why should “ms-edit” be avoided ?
Was this made just cause someone wanted to do something in Rust?
Probably entirely AI-generated.
It'd be nice if they didn't recommend winget for installation though. winget is an egregious security risk that Microsoft has just like pretended follows even minimal security practices, despite just launching four years ago with no protection from bad actors whatsoever and then never implementing any improvements since.
So much excitement that this got posted 3 times in a week
1. By the author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 2. Ubuntu Publication - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44306892
And this post.