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Microsoft IT

Microsoft's Edit on Windows is a New Command-Line Text Editor (theverge.com) 99

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:5, 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

    • Re: Vim is already available for Windows (Score:4, Informative)

      by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:06PM (#65388233) Journal

      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 certainly not a coincidence that this often turns up as a stumbling block for new and old programmers.

      Because we wanted to avoid this for a built-in default editor, we decided that we wanted a modeless editor for Windows (versus a modal editor where new users would have to remember different modes of operation and how to switch between them).

      This unfortunately limited our choices to a list of editors that either had no first-party support for Windows or were too big to bundle them with every version of the OS. As a result, Edit was born.

      • 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.

        • Re: Vim is already available for Windows (Score:5, Insightful)

          by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:59PM (#65388431)
          Why not port edlin? It's already more sophisticated than /., for example you can type éãSä®å and it'll be handled correctly.

            • The problem is the assertion that modal is bad.

              It isn't. It's good, and is the basis for the power of vi, and vim.

              It's just ignorance, that's all...solved by educating yourself.

              I notice it supports regexes, that other source of frustration for the ignorant...

              Just learn how to do it. It's really not difficult.

              • I use vim. I'm not great at it, but I enjoy being able to do regexps with tokens, which is probably one of the primary reasons I use it at all since I got graphics. I used to use vi occasionally even on Amiga just for practice, though, and I had vi for DOS. Most of the time I use kwrite, which has just enough features that I want to use it.

                If I were forced to use a glass terminal, it would be vim all the way.

                I used edlin only once or twice. It was tolerably powerful as very simple editors go, but the interf

              • Re: Vim is already available for Windows (Score:4, Informative)

                by johnnys ( 592333 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @09:01PM (#65389099)

                True, but modal is bad for anyone who does not want to learn. And that's a LOT of people.

                Modal means that the user has to pay attention to what mode they are in and they have to know what the modes are and what they do. For a user who wants to make a note or change a line in a file and they don't do it often, this may seem like too much effort if they are just "users" who are used to point-and-click and have no interest in "technical stuff".

                This is why so many people are considering upgrading to Windows 11 or switching to Mac, because they don't want to have to do the small amount of learning and "techie work" needed to install Linux.

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by cstacy ( 534252 )

                  Modal means that the user has to pay attention to what mode they are in and they have to know what the modes are and what they do. For a user who wants to make a note or change a line in a file and they don't do it often, this may seem like too much effort if they are just "users" who are used to point-and-click and have no interest in "technical stuff".

                  Yup, that sounds exactly like who I want quickly hand-editing my system config files!

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
                Well I know that you can't argue over personal tastes, and many people like modal editors, but I don't think it is about "educating yourself". Perhaps the opposite is true, as this interview with vi's creator, Bill Joy [substack.com], explains:

                REVIEW: What would you do differently?
                JOY: I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. I think the interesting thing is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programma

              • Why are you criticizing people for wanting the more straight-forward option?

                Modal editors make certain things easier, but if you aren't doing those things you shouldn't have to learn an obtuse text editing language just to alter a couple of lines in a text file.

        • You really think that trying to port a thirty-year-old code base written for 16-bit x86 processors with no support for modern necessities like character encoding would have been easier?

      • 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.

      • Nano, ftw !
        <looks around nervously>
        A wise man once said never get between vi vs Emacs
        <oh my god, I hope i got the spelling right .... run!>

      • Give 'em time. This is Microsoft, remember - before too long it'll need some registry settings to make it work, it'll have a windows UI and Copilot integration, and will be multiple megabytes to install. Oh, and it'll need updates every second week because... well, because.

    • 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:4, Interesting)

    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.

    • wonder why they don't mention that?

      I consider it a bonus when people don't constantly brag about it.

    • My background is Windows, where I use a lot of modeless text editors over the years. Then I "inherited" a mixed environment (Linux, Windows and BSD) where everything not Windows does not have any GUI. While not having issues working with the terminal at all, tried several times to work with vi. Even with cheat sheets. But I do not seem to get/grasp/grok vi. Not all too fond of nano either, but that is workable. Until I discovered the editor 'micro'.

      This is a pretty potent text editor, but with all the commo

  • 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.

  • Marketing working overtime. (Score:4, Funny)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:28PM (#65388319)

    "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...

    • Maybe it will improve interaction with nano editions of Windows Server? Or however else those GUI-stripped editions of Windows Server are called.

  • 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

    • Why are you making things up to be mad about? It's a text-mode text editor. Why did that put a bug up your ass?

      Did you even look at it?

  • 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.

    • No .. it's completely unecessary. Just make every key combination that results in printable character (a, shift-a, etc) a command that self-inserts that character.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by piojo ( 995934 )

        The problem is that for commands to be really useful, you need a lot of them. For example you can consider ctrl, shift, and the arrow keys to compromise commands for manipulating a selection, but that's not rich enough to be a pleasure to use on a slow connection like remote desktop on a bad network. You want enough commands (or a logic to construct commands) that you can make something happen without waiting for screen feedback at each step of the operation.

        For example selecting a paragraph and the followi

        • OK, but what's the conflict with modeless? It's really just a design choice, but most editors, e.g. emacs, moved on from vi and used a modeless design because it's more intuitive.

          There are plenty of non-printable key modifiers such as ctrl, alt, meta/windows to use if you want to use alpha keys for commands as well as function keys.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by piojo ( 995934 )

            Sure, existing modifiers may have a lot of unused potential, but it is still relatively few keys, into which a lot of commands would need to be shoehorned. I also don't imagine I'd remember the complex operations that would have to be used. The beauty of having a lot of keys available for the commands is that each key press does something simple. Say for example that one of my operations is to select function arguments (or anything within '(...)'). I might map that to ctrl+shift+(, and add +win or something

    • Modal editors are more complex in order to support things I don't need them to do. I don't need a modal editor to quickly edit text files. If anything, it would be very slightly less efficient. Maybe it helps if you're working with thousands of lines of code, but since I don't do that, you're basically giving me crap for not sharing your particular needs.
  • This will be really nice once it gets into their default server OS install, because then you'll be able to use it via remote PowerShell sessions. Currently you can use psedit to do this, but it only works if you're using the PowerShell IDE.
    • Yeah, I'm looking forward to being able to quickly edit text files in an RMM session. That'll be much more convenient than pulling the file down, changing it, and sending it back.

  • Are we back in 1995?

  • I have VI.EXE from the NT4 Resource Kit on my USB stick of essential tools. It's the most portable editor Microsoft has shipped :-)

  • You may win this time, MS EDIT.
    ls -lah /usr/bin/nano
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 256.4K Mar 6 2024 /usr/bin/nano

    (Just use Far Manager and its editor, available on Linux, even OpenWrt)

  • You could download is here [gnu.org] or on a mirror [gnu.org].
  • Text-mode UI is not the same as command-line.

  • > find and replace functionality

    Never heard of this feature. This will be revolutionary!

  • There was also an older program of the same name [edm2.com]. You could kick off 'make' with it, and it was setup fairly well for coding at the time. But fell short of even the most primitive IDE from Borland or PowerBASIC.

    And probably more famous was the EDIT.COM in later versions of MS-DOS. This had a decent implementation of CUA [wikipedia.org] (Common User Access) key boards short cuts. Some of these are pretty common in modern Windows programs, like shift-insert to paste.

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