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Microsoft IT

Microsoft's Edit on Windows is a New Command-Line Text Editor (theverge.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the FWIW dept.
Microsoft unveiled "Edit on Windows," a new command-line text editor, at its Build conference today. The open-source tool allows developers to edit files directly in the command line without switching to another app, similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly.

Accessible by typing "edit" in a command prompt, the lightweight editor (less than 250KB) includes features like multiple file support via ctrl + P shortcuts, find and replace functionality, and regular expression support. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," said Christopher Nguyen, product manager of Windows Terminal, noting that 32-bit Windows versions already ship with MS-DOS Edit.

Microsoft also wanted to avoid the notorious "how do I exit vim?" problem by creating a modeless editor, The Verge writes. The tool will be available to Windows Insiders in the coming months.

Microsoft's Edit on Windows is a New Command-Line Text Editor More | Reply

Microsoft's Edit on Windows is a New Command-Line Text Editor

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  • Vim is already available for Windows (Score:3, Insightful)

    by innocent_white_lamb ( 151825 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @02:57PM (#65388213)

    https://www.vim.org/download.p... [vim.org]

    It's been around for a long time, it's well tested, it does a whole lot of stuff and thousands (or millions) of people use it every day.

    Why re-invent the wheel?

    Not-Invented-Here Syndrome?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Exactly, or why not port EDIT?
      I have tough time thinking anyone on Windows really wants something *new*.

      If you are developer you are probably using using something a little more feature complete than anything we'd call an 'editor'

      If you are sysadmin you might actually really want something you could use in an SSH terminal to make quick updates and changes on a remote box, but if you're an experienced windows Admin you probably are familiar with Edit, or you have already solved your problem with something el

    • they.already answered that in first link

      Why build another CLI editor?
      What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows. 32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS Edit or, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox. From there, we narrowed down our optionsâ¦

      Many of you are probably familiar with the âoeHow do I exit vim?â meme. While it is relatively simple to learn the magic exit incantation, itâ(TM)s cer

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        No that offers no explanation as to why they did not do a port of the old 16-bit Edit to 64 bit. Which to me would make a whole lot more sense because much of the audience for a command line editor on Windows is going to be familiar with DOS's Edit.

      • they.already answered that in first link

        You actually RTFA? What's wrong with you!

    • vim.tiny (hah!): 725732b
      joe: 463188b
      nano: 119332b

      I'd rather have joe, but nano is 1/2 of Microsoft's footprint.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Next up: An emacs clone ... done badly!

    • Vi throws up a brick. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      https://www.vim.org/download.p... [vim.org]

      It's been around for a long time, it's well tested, it does a whole lot of stuff and thousands (or millions) of people use it every day.

      Why re-invent the wheel?

      Not-Invented-Here Syndrome?

      The re-invention justification:

      ..similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly..

      The reason:

      Vim is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi..

      Clearly it wasn’t improved enough. Especially knowing how “user friendly” vi was.

      (It’s kind of like a Slashdotter being forced to construct responses with HTML tags and no Unicode support. Nerds thought that was “good enough” too for mainstream.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Yes, for the uninitiated, a modless editor is probably a better default. I'm just glad on Fedora and Ubuntu it's easy to change the default editor back to vim, as decent as nano is.

        It's kind of funny but after many years of using Vim, when using modeless editors I end up littering the text with gg, dd, yy, :w or a bunch of :q. Fortunately all the good editors have pretty decent VI emulation modes in them these days. Visual Studio Code has quite a decent one, thankfully. I find working with modeless edit

  • The open-source tool allows developers to edit files directly in the command line without switching to another app, similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly.

    So you mean, like... edit? Of yore? No mention of it being a reintroduction of a concept gone by?

    the lightweight editor (less than 250KB) includes features like multiple file support via ctrl + P shortcuts, find and replace functionality, and regular expression support.

    That sounds unusually competent, and with usefully welcome features.

    "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," said Christopher Nguyen, product manager of Windows Terminal, noting that 32-bit Windows versions already ship with MS-DOS Edit.

    Yeah, if you guys had done 16 bit support in NTVDM as is available in an OSS replacement for same, you coulda used MS-DOS edit...

    Microsoft also wanted to avoid the notorious "how do I exit vim?" problem by creating a modeless editor, The Verge writes.

    You could easily solve it by making the mode clear on the status line, and how to get out of it too, but no need for it to be mode-based anyway.

  • How exciting (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 )

    As far as I'm concerned they might as well resurrect edlin. I won't be using it.

  • What no edlin? DOS line editing from way back.

  • We have come full circle, msdos old edit.com with it's basic TUI is now the latest windows feature ...

  • Written in Rust (Score:3)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:25PM (#65388311)

    This editor is written in Rust, wonder why they don't mention that? Looks decent. I would use it instead of Nano for console work on Debian, therefore I look forward to the Linux fork.

    • Looks like the source code plus Linux and Windows binaries for ARM64 and x86-64 are . [github.com]

    • This editor is written in Rust, wonder why they don't mention that?

      because who fucking cares what it's written in?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by unrtst ( 777550 )

        This editor is written in Rust, wonder why they don't mention that?

        because who fucking cares what it's written in?

        TBH, it got my attention. I didn't check out the github page until I saw this info about Rust, so thanks, Tough Love!

    • I used Joe because I already knew WordStar. I use nano because everyone told me to, and I learned it on an hour, maybe less.

      The comment about users asking 'how do I exit vim???' says it all. Vim is clever, multifaceted, and overkill for casual text editing. I have avoided it and ed because they are not work the trouble, to me, to learn them.

      And when you excoriate me for not investing the time to loan such an incredible tool, consider that I just wanted bolt together text, I did not want to learn to weld dis

      • If I need user friendliness, I can use joe or nano.
        If I need the power of vi, I can simply use sed. sed is non-interactive vi.
        sed: 67720b

    • This editor is written in Rust, wonder why they don't mention that?

      Because not even they give a rat fuck. No one cares.

  • I used to use the edit.com executable to modify text files including autoexec and config.sys as well as batch files back in the DOS days. This is nothing new, just putting and .com file back in the distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    • The old edit is a 16-bit DOS program. Doesn't run on a 64-bit version of Windows.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      It was also handy for converting text docs that didn't use the windows CRLF EOL sequence to something notepad could display correctly. Edit (which had no issue with the unix style EOLs) would convert it replace the EOLs with CRLFs automatically when you opened then saved the file. Notepad took until 2018 before it could finally handle them.

  • "What should we call our new editor?"
    "How about 'Edit?'"
    "Didn't we have an editor called 'Edit' already?"
    Everybody glares. "Shut up, old timer. Nobody asked you."

  • Must be some intern's project and they have desperately run out of ideas...

  • Two Words.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by j_f_chamblee ( 253315 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:57PM (#65388425) Homepage Journal

    start notepad++

    • +1

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by okra ( 446305 )

      I always add the npp="C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" "$1" macro to windows so I can edit from the command line by just typing npp readme.md

    • I just tried that but it didn't work in the command line. Thanks for the tip but you completely failed to meet the customer requirements. Like ... the one thing that this is about.

      I really hope you don't ever work in a position where you have customers. I feel sorry for them just thinking about the possibility you may.

  • Typical MS bullshit. "similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly". Which is to say, they have duplicated some of the simplest functionality of vim, and omitted anything which is the least bit difficult to implement. Guaranteed it won't handle regular expressions completely and correctly.

    "more user-friendly" means once you have read through 1000 pages of descriptive text you have a chance of being able to use this piece of shit, but even so it won't do what you need it to.

    • As a big fan of pico/nano, I have to disagree. Complicated editors like vim or emacs have their place, but there are a lot of things they aren't good for. Drop a new user into vim and they'll be completely lost. They'll have no idea how to do almost anything including, yes, exit the editor. Nothing works like any other editor they've ever used. Drop a new user into nano and they just start typing. It works exactly how they expect it to, and the available commands are shown right at the bottom of the s

  • A non-modal text editor? Only took ~40 years eh?

  • Accessible by typing "edit" in a command prompt, the lightweight editor (less than 250KB)

    40 years ago, we even had GUI editors running on machines with less RAM than that

  • I was certainly annoyed when first moving to 64-bit Windows that 'edit filename.txt' didn't work. I guess this fixes that. Having said that, a small batch file called 'edit.bat' that calls notepad (or notepad++ or one of about 1000 other options) also works -- or you can just get used to typing 'notepad' at the prompt.

    Launching a GUI editor from the command line doesn't work if you text ssh into a Windows box instead of connecting via VNC or RDP or similar. I have done that, but I cannot pretend I do it re

  • Stop trying to avoid a good feature because of ignorance. Modal is the source of the power of vi et al and isn't that difficult to learn.

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