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Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows
- rhabarba 6y ago(tenox /does/ have a point here.)
- stevekemp 6y agoI had a sudden memory of using edlin, and "COPY CON FILE.TXT", but it has been years since I've used a Windows desktop so I don't know what is available for the console. (Of course everybody knows about Notepad..)
- rhabarba 6y agoEDLIN has been removed for quite some time, its successor, EDIT.COM, has not survived the let’s-get-rid-of-efficient-software Windows XP era either.
- tartoran 6y agoI still casually use copy con in windows. Sometimes i forget which is the save shortcut. I think ctrl-z, right? I also fondly remember edit.com, too bad it didnt survive..
- stevekemp 6y agoThat's a shame, I had a happy few minutes remembering assembling binaries via debug.com which was the other way of creating files back then.
- ChrisSD 6y agoI think EDIT.COM was 16-bit so couldn't survive the 64-bit transition.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI definitely remember windows having some built in terminal editor during Windows XP. Maybe EDIT was removed after then.
- rhabarba 6y agoEDIT was dropped with 64-bit.
- Jaruzel 6y agoPre-windows 95, EDIT.COM was actually QBASIC.EXE running with the command line switch /EDIT. Really annoying, as it meant that if you wanted a native TUI editor on an MS-DOS book disk, you had to shoe-horn the larger QBASIC.EXE on to it somehow just to be able to edit config files.
- m0xte 6y agoThis was so annoying that I built a stand-alone clone of edit using VB for MSDOS. Unfortunately after compiling it was larger than QBASIC :(
- userbinator 6y agoI believe EDIT.COM is still there in all 32-bit versions of Windows, but since it's a 16-bit application, none of the 64-bit versions have it. More unusually, Win9x doesn't have EDLIN, but it seems the 32-bit versions of NT-based Windows do.
- the-dude 6y agoI remember using The Boxer, console based editor last century. This was on OS/2, but I seem to recall it was available for Windows too. Not sure though.
- rhabarba 6y agoThere (was and) is a Boxer text editor for Windows, a commercial BRIEF successor. Its developer, Boxer Software, was founded in the early 90s, so it could have had an OS/2 version once.
- craigching 6y agoNice! I’ll have to check that out! I used BRIEF back in the early 90’s developing plant monitoring/management software. Our products ran on DOS and Windows after that. I’d been using emacs at school, but BRIEF was our editor of choice for this. The column copy and paste is something I still haven’t found as intuitive as BRIEF in any other editor.
- rhabarba 6y agoGRIEF is an open-source BRIEF clone, it can probably do that. (The article made me try it. I found and reported a few macOS problems, but the Windows version seems to be functional. I might keep it.)
- agustif 6y agomicro works nice under wsl/shell env in windows
- rhabarba 6y agoWhy would you do that as there’s a native micro for Windows? (I, personally, find micro too nano’ish. YMMV.)
- inakarmacoma 6y agoIt's interesting, a shame emacs org-mode is discarded so quickly. If only the barrier of entry weren't so high.
- rhabarba 6y agoThe author implies that vi/Vim and an Emacs are the usual suspects here, but they’re rather foreign on Windows and DOS-like environments - which is true. Other editors in the list are - at least, UI/UX-wise - much more common to DOS people.
- yellowapple 6y agoEmacs has a CUA mode to address that specific issue: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CUA-Bindings.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CU...
- rhabarba 6y agoIt still feels rather different than (e.g.) TSE. Don’t misunderstand me, I surely like Emacs and I use it regularly, but the command-line version is a strange thing in a DOS environment.
- stOneskull 6y agoi noticed he made a 64bit version of fte himself, so i went and got that, and it's great. i didn't even think about a console text editor in windows before. good article.
- techntoke 6y agoVim works great. Don't see why you'd want to use anything else, except maybe Emacs.
- rhabarba 6y agoI am quite happy with (Acme and) GNU Emacs as my GUI editors, but Emacs is really annoying to use on a console to me, especially on non-native platforms like Windows. One of the reasons why I like the article.
- techntoke 6y agoUntil recently with Windows Terminal the Windows console app has been garbage. Any text editor would suck using the classic Windows console.
- rhabarba 6y agoI find the Windows Terminal much inferior to ConEmu. Anyway, text editors specifically written for DOS environments integrate rather well with the „classic Windows console“.
- yellowapple 6y agoThankfully, you don't have to use Emacs on the console. Not even on a Powershell-only Windows system (such systems will let you launch graphical applications just fine). Even in the article's use-case (remotely editing files on some remote server), Emacs ships with TRAMP, which can be used with PuTTY's plink to do remote editing (assuming the remote host is accessible via SSH): https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Tramp_on_Windows https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Tramp_on_Windows There's also support for TRAMP over SMB, though I haven't personally tried it (usually for SMB I let the OS handle it and then point Emacs at the local representation).
- justinmk 6y agoscoop install neovim
- slim 6y agoopenwatcom vi looks great
- craz8 6y agoMicrosoft did release a nice editor called M back around the end of the 80s Here’s some info about it, and maybe a way to get something that works today http://www.os2museum.com/wp/microsoft-editor/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/microsoft-editor/
- karmakaze 6y agoThere was this awesome editor called Kedit that I used on OS/2 and Win NT. I think there were text and GUI versions, but not free. Edit: search turns up a free/shareware GUI version, no mention of the 'classic' text-mode one
- BeetleB 6y ago> MC overall seems far nicer than FAR On Windows, use FAR, not mc. Some aspects of mc I think don't work on Windows (last I tried), and frankly, FAR is significantly more powerful.
- eatonphil 6y agoMy laptops run Windows but I do all my development in Linux VMs via Powershell's built-in SSH client. My biggest ask on Windows is for a native mosh client. There aren't currently any.
- jesse9766 6y agoHave you tried using Fluent Terminal? It is available on github and the Windows Store. To use mosh you need to connect via the quick connect menu in the top left corner of the program.
- rhabarba 6y agoI’m not sure whether a JavaScript-based terminal is a good idea.
- jesse9766 6y agoI haven't done a test yet, but the Fluent Terminal seems fast enough and doesn't eat up that many resources surprisingly. As a UWP program it feels very snappy (as opposed to Hyper being a full on electron app using 200MB for simple text output!) I don't care what technologies they use to build a program, as long as it works. I haven't experienced any hangups using SSH, so it's good enough for me.
- nickjj 6y agoI tried a ton of them for a while and the microsoft terminal or wsltty both use the least amount of resources, open the quickest and have the lowest input latency.
- banana_giraffe 6y agoPersonally, I'm using mosh inside of WSL using wsltty for the terminal itself. It works well.
- Lammy 6y agoHow about `ee`? https://github.com/herrbischoff/ee https://github.com/herrbischoff/ee
- rhabarba 6y agoDoes it have a Windows version?
- hazeii 6y agoI've been using WordPerfect's 'Programmers Editor' since the days of DOS; the C rewrite works for me (on Linux, DOS and Win-whatever), works best with a keyboard with F-keys on the left. It's about a 75Kb executable on Windows (50K stripped on linux).
- deepspace 6y agoInteresting to see The Semware Editor in there. Way back before Windows, I used to use Qedit, the predecessor of TSE, and at the time it blew most other DOS editors out of the water. I believe it is the first shareware software I gladly paid for. By the time Windows and TSE came along, there were many other choices, but a 64 bit build of TSE might be worth looking into again as a console editor. My fingers still default to the Wordstar keymap from Borland Pascal/C days, so my daily driver in Linux is Joe - wish there was a Windows build available.
- rhabarba 6y agoJoe actually has a Windows build - right from their website. https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io By the way, there is a free semi-GUI WordStar clone named WordTsar.
- azizuysal 6y agoThere is micro (https://micro-editor.github.io https://micro-editor.github.io). It works great on Mac and I think it works on Windows too.
- shadowfox 6y agoI second micro. It has become my default console editor on both Windows and Linux for quick editing tasks.
- lillesvin 6y agoYeah, for his criteria it seems like a perfect match. He mentions it as the very last one and seems to like it but think it ought to include a file browser... I disagree, though. File browsing is a different beast, and a good file browser would be able to launch micro for editing a file. Likewise you can probably configure micro to use [file browser] for browsing files.
- musicale 6y agoTried it but it felt sluggish. Maybe the lua bits are slowing things down?
- rhabarba 6y agoI had micro as my default text editor on Windows for a while, but it felt like a nano port to me. Not sure why.
- petepete 6y agoI used to work with someone whose editor of choice was Epsilon[0]. I've never seen or heard it mentioned anywhere, it never figures in any discussions on technical forums/sites I frequent, but it appears to have a bit of a cult following. Also, it definitely has the best mascot[1] [0] https://lugaru.com/ https://lugaru.com/ [1] https://lugaru.com/pics/changing.gif https://lugaru.com/pics/changing.gif
- redis_mlc 6y agoBrief (by Underware) was "the shit" (awesome) back in the 80s. Even borderless (no chrome). One of the very useful features was that it had a multiple resolution selection feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor) (It's mentioned in the article - yay.) But I use vim/neovim if I'm on a Windows box today. Hasn't happened yet in 2020, though.
- rhabarba 6y agoEpsilon seems to be a GUI editor?
- rhabarba 6y agoI stand corrected: It seems to have both versions included. Still, 250 US$ seem to be obscene.
- petepete 6y agoYeah, it's a hefty price tag. The programmer in question (super experienced Perl-slinger) had been using it so long he knew just about every command and trick, and he'd customised his set up so much he'd locked himself in! Edit: an excerpt from the website that indicates its age > Why not settle for the "free" editor that comes with your compiler, or some lesser programmer's editor, or even try to use a word processor to edit your programs?
- rhabarba 6y ago
- lsllc 6y agoThe TSE/QEDIT and FTE TUI's look like they were made with Borland's Turbo Vision framework [0]. Oh man, so much retro-computing these days on HN, I love it! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
- tuckerpo 6y ago4coder exists (https://4coder.handmade.network/ https://4coder.handmade.network/). Quite popular with the "handmade" crowd of folks (Casey Muratori & friends).
- drummer 6y agoAnyone remember Sidekick? It was the first 'terminate and stay resident' program I saw back in the day. Used it as source code editor in DOS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick
- rhabarba 6y agoBorland surely had many editors, it seems.
- jedisct1 6y agoI use Jed.
- dugmartin 6y agoMy goto editor in the 80s for DOS and 90s for Windows was Norton Editor. I had it on various diskettes to use when I needed to edit files on customer's computers when I worked in a computer store in college. However it looks like Windows 98 broke it (according to this message: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.editors/l24T-WhI17I https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.editors/l24T-Wh...) For anyone brave enough to try random downloaded apps it looks like it is available here: https://winworldpc.com/product/norton-editor/20 https://winworldpc.com/product/norton-editor/20
- userbinator 6y agoNo mention of MS-DOS EDIT which came with Win95 and AFAIK is still there in Windows 10 (32-bit version only)? That would probably be the editor I've used the longest, alongside Notepad and vi. It has a very useful "binary" mode that is somewhat of a cross between a text and hex editor; I've done a lot of binary patching using it.
- discordance 6y agoThe author tried to use EDIT in the first screenshot at the top
- keithnz 6y agohonorable mention, even though you are likely not to run it on a headless windows server, is with a WSL shell you can run any *nix terminal editor and edit windows files just fine.
- bitwize 6y agoEmacs runs in Windows consoles. Presumably you start it the usual way, by saying: emacs -nw When you have Emacs, why use anything else? :)
- rhabarba 6y agoEven in CUA-mode, Emacs is very unusual in quite a lot of ways in the DOS world. That’s why, I guess.
- grzm 6y ago(2018)
- Renaud 6y agoThe author seems to focus a lot on having 64 bit versions of the editors. I'm wondering what's the downside of using a 32 bits in the case of a console text editor? I doubt that it's because you could theoretically need to load 4GB+ text files in memory. Is there a good reason to want a 64 bit version of an editor to the point of excluding it if there isn't one?
- Hello71 6y ago> I also cry a lot about 64-bit Windows builds because I work a lot in WinPE and other environments where syswow64 is not available.
- jussij 6y agoOn Windows the executable will most likely only have access to 2 GB of memory. The Windows PE header contains the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag which controls the memory available to the executable. When that flag is off (i.e. the Microsoft recommended default value) the executable only has access to 2 GB of memory. To access more memory that LARGEADDRESSAWARE PE flag set to on: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/largeaddressaware-handle-large-addresses?redirectedfrom=MSDN&view=vs-2019 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/largead... But in any case, you would think 2 GB is more than enough RAM for most text handling scenarios.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoIf you mention HT editor, you also have to mention Hiew. HT is sort of a clone of Hiew.
- jakear 6y agoVS Code’s remote ssh extension could help here. It’s basically a “headless vscode” running on the remote instance that your local machine can connect to. (A la. emacs, from what I’ve been told.) The language services and etc. all run on the remote instance, so there isn’t the giant network penalty you get from sshfs or whatever either. Disclaimer: on team, but not in this area specifically :)
- andreareina 6y agoConnecting to a remote emacs client is a bit of a pain. What it does do is handle remote paths via TRAMP: pretty much anything that takes a path (file editing, magit, shell mode, etc) handles ssh automatically.
- jakear 6y agoSounds like you know a bit about this, have you tried using the remote-ssh extension for VSCode? If so, how does it compare?
- andreareina 6y agoI've never used VSCode. A cursory look suggests that the VSCode way performs better (in particular, no need to ship files back-and-forth), but depends on the remote end also having VSCode installed. The TRAMP way suffers a bit when dealing with large files, or large numbers of files, but works anywhere ssh + the usual shell utilities does.
- deeblering4 6y agoI respectfully disagree that “learning curve” is a reason not to go with a well established console editor like VIM. There is a learning curve for everything, including the code and configurations being edited. I think taking the time to learn tools, like editors, that are available on many platforms saves time in the long run and helps to manage diverse systems more effectively.
- rhabarba 6y agoFor many people, Vim’s learning curve does not justify its features. Line editors are not for everyone.
- jpalomaki 6y agoInvestment in learning something like vi makes sense in the nix world, where it is available everywhere by default. On Windows side the problem is that there's no comprehensive "default editor" to learn. If you are doing server side sysadmin work on different environments then you might be limited to what is already available. Often you don't want to go through the trouble of getting a specific editor installed in order to edit some config files (3rd party software may require approval, somebody to install it, etc).
- rhabarba 6y ago> where it is available everywhere by default It is not (anymore), so not even that is clear.
- cosmiccatnap 6y agoWhy? Vim is compiled nativly for windows as it is and I can't imagine a better editor to ask for in a terminal