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Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu
- k3vinw 1y agoIs it only the keyboard shortcuts that they’re borrowing from VS code? I hope they have plans for LSP and extensibility.
- lhecker 1y agoThe plan is indeed to make it extensible if time and popularity permits it. LSP would be an extension itself, however, instead of being built into the editor. We want to retain a lean core editor so people can ship it everywhere (e.g. even into small Docker images).
- k3vinw 1y agoThat’s excellent. Thanks for sharing and best wishes to the team’s success and popularity of the new editor!
- mixmastamyk 1y agoThe keyboard shortcuts are from Windows, adapted from the original MacOS. IBM CUA was also a factor.
- orsenthil 1y agoDoes anyone know who is the original author of this tool. I tried it on Linux and it is excellent! The usability, simplicity and intuitiveness. I remember I must have used this first, before I got into linux. But then the linux editors, like nano, ed, vim, emacs - with all the religious , political and passionate developers, didn't manage to pull up this intuitive interface. Even a simple copy of the design would have helped a new comer to linux, instead of presenting them with Nano as the default editor.
- userbinator 1y agoI guess it's someone who worked at Microsoft in the late 80s/early 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor
- augusto-moura 1y agoI vividly remember using edit on an Windows XP (or was it a 98?) when I was a kid. It was one of those hidden commands that I learned while watching my uncles and father do trickery in CMD Edit: just read https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-source/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-... and it seems that all 32bit windows versions had edit. I was probably using Windows XP 32 the last time I remember using edit
- augusto-moura 1y agoI also remember that tried running edit on windows 8 and got surprised that it was removed
- suby 1y agoI remember the author posting on a HN thread a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961
- jacooper 1y agoMicro is much more intuitive than nano, but I think Edit is better. Just need it to start rolling out to production distros.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoI looked for similar for twenty years. Including compiling my own version from setedit, a clone of a turbo pascal ide. Ten years later someone mentioned “ne” which was acceptable and packaged. Several years ago the better micro was born then packaged, I’ve used since. It has more features than edit like highlighting, though missing a menu. That’s good enough I think. In some situations like constrained environments (openwrt) I use nano with CUA keybindings because micro is too big.
- quantadev 1y agoWill be great to disabuse people from using VIM. I mean in VIM you can't even easily exit. I've always had to literally reboot my computer to get out of VIM. One time even that didn't work, so I had to pull the main circuit breaker in my house to get it to quit.
- ajaypradhan 1y ago[flagged]
- simonw 1y agoThis inspired me to have a try at running Edit on macOS via Docker - here's what I got working (should work for anyone else with Docker installed on Apple silicon too, I pushed the image to the GitHub Container Registry): docker run --platform linux/arm64 \ -it --rm \ -v $(pwd):/workspace \ ghcr.io/simonw/alpine-edit Run that in a directory to open Edit against the files in that directory. More notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/21/edit-is-now-open-source/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/21/edit-is-now-open-sourc... - and a new TIL on publishing to the GitHub Container Registry here: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry You can also compile directly from source on macOS - instructions here, I've not tried this yet: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/blob/main/README.md#build-instructions https://github.com/microsoft/edit/blob/main/README.md#build-...
- kinduff 1y agoI built it for macOS natively and it works like a charm!
- rfl890 1y agoJust wondering, why did you make an entire container image instead of trying to compile it from source first?
- VikingCoder 1y agoBecause now I can use their Docker image trivially. They can also trivially use their Docker container on multiple computers, multiple VMs, multiple VPSs. They can Docker Compose it into other Docker images they're setting up, too. I'm definitely not a Docker expert, but I've become a huge fan.
- simonw 1y agoMainly because I wanted an excuse to figure out how to package tools like this using Docker. It also felt like a better way to distribute the tool for other people to use: I don't want to distribute a compiled binary (because in macOS you then need to sign it for other people to use it), but a Docker incantation skips that step.
- culebron21 1y agoI'm surprised nobody in the comments mentioned Norton Commander, and its editor. It was mostly enough for file editing. And navigating folders in DOS with NC was very convenient, that at the time you didn't even understand why people needed windows. Today, it has successors: Midnight Commander (TUI on Linux), FAR Manager (TUI for Windows), Windows Commander (graphical UI, Windows). Although MC is good tool, I notice something rubs me the wrong way in it, and I rarely use it -- probably, it's the conflict of focuses between a panel and the shell. E.g. you typed something, then tried to move to another folder, hit enter -> MC decides you run the command, hides the panels, lets the system yell at you "no such executable".
- wonger_ 1y agoI just opened mc and mcedit yesterday for the first time. Mcedit was sorta interesting but I'm already too vim-brained. How would you change mc to make it more intuitive?
- culebron21 1y agoI don't know, I relied on it to edit configs over SSH, and navigate servers file systems that way (it sort of gives a better feel what's where), but locally I used SublimeText.
- int_19h 1y agoFar Manager isn't just for Windows anymore: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l https://github.com/elfmz/far2l Debian even has it in the official repos. It's also on Homebrew.
- russellbeattie 1y agoA few months ago there was a front page article looking back at WordPerfect for DOS. I commented that modern text-based apps never seem to look as good as mid-80s DOS apps for some reason. So it's apropos that Microsoft of all companies launches an old-school app like this.
- int_19h 1y agoI think a large part of it is that DOS made it really easy to make good TUI apps, what with direct access to the text framebuffer and keyboard. Unix console is a mess in comparison (albeit with its own advantages such as remoting). And the modern crop of TUI apps is almost entirely Unix-centric; this one is a very rare exception.
- waynecochran 1y agoI remember using Brief in DOS back in 1990 or so. It rocked. I have been an emacs guy in the Linux world, but I would love to have Brief again.
- ChicagoDave 1y agoOr just use nano like most VIM haters.
- T3OU-736 1y agoAnother text editor from the makers of Edlin. (Sorry, could not help myself!)
- mixmastamyk 1y agocopy con for the win!
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoI hate Microsoft's naming strategy here. "code", "edit", it's nearly as bad as "meta" and "X". We're on a slippery slope towards DFW's subsidized time. Year of the depend adult undergarment, here we come.
- VagabundoP 1y agoI started computing in the early 80s and have always wondered why there wasn't a standard keyboard button with Cut,Copy,Paste. Thing of all the (wo)man-hours in computing lost due to the slight difference in people finding the modifier key+key (including the slight increase in error rates) and the just having a dedicated Cut/Copy/Paste keys.
- skissane 1y agoSun workstations had Cut/Copy/Paste buttons on their keyboards. Probably some other workstation vendors did too. It just never made it to the PC or Mac worlds
- int_19h 1y agoI remember some keyboards in 90s to early 00s - back when tall keycaps were the norm - having secondary labels written on the side of the key facing the user, usually indicating the standard Windows shortcut for that key. The exact set would vary, but pretty much all of them labelled X/C/V as Cut/Copy/Paste. Here's a good example: https://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards/comments/w72hiw/ive_been_looking_if_this_keyboard_can_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards/comments/w72hiw/ive_been_... It was certainly convenient for people learning the ropes. Too bad it died out when chiclet keyboards became the norm.
- nop17 1y agoIt state support macos but in release section there is no macos package.
- AbuAssar 1y agothere is also Midnight Commander Editor (mcedit), which has syntax highlighting, macros, code snippets and automatic indentation!
- tedunangst 1y agoThat sound you hear is all the old men yelling at clouds that a full screen terminal editor is not a CLI editor.
- JdeBP 1y agoThere have definitely been two so far. (-: * https://mastodon.social/@cks/114704709419805125 https://mastodon.social/@cks/114704709419805125
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoRight - if you can't use it on teletype, then it's not a CLI editor.
- seabrookmx 1y agoI checked this out. It's kind of neat. It's barebones from a programming perspective though.. it didn't seem to have syntax highlighting out of the box for example. If you want a TUI text editor with CTRL-C/V and mouse support, I'd recommend looking at micro: https://github.com/zyedidia/micro https://github.com/zyedidia/micro
- marssaxman 1y agoYears ago I wanted a TUI text editor with ctrl-C/V, so I wrote one. I've been using it every day, ever since: https://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette/ https://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette/ I didn't care about mouse support, though.
- Milpotel 1y agoI used micro for some years but recently switched to https://github.com/craigbarnes/dte https://github.com/craigbarnes/dte. A lesser known, more 90s-like, alternative I used several years ago is ne: https://github.com/vigna/ne/ https://github.com/vigna/ne/.
- pepa65 1y agoCraig Barnes is epic. Great, versatile editor, dte.
- sheepscreek 1y agoBack when I was in school (like junior/middle school), we would program in a DOS based IDE call QuickBasic, and eventually Turbo C++ (in higher grades/high school). That blue background is so nostalgic. For quick editing, my go to is vim. It’s a real superpower to have if you’re confined to the terminal. However, in the modern post-AI/vibe coding days with super fast AI completions and agentic editing, I think GUIs are the way to go. They make the constant context switching more seamless. Whereas terminal editors work best for very focused zen coding. That’s just my opinion.
- adhamsalama 1y ago
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- aa-jv 1y agoI wonder if anyone has ever given any druthers to porting PC-Write to linux .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write I must have written a million lines of code with PC-Write in the 80's .. seems kind of odd to me that it has just disappeared into oblivion, given that its an extremely powerful editor. Huh, the source is out there somewhere .. might be a fun Lazarus/Free Pascal project one of these days ..
- Y_Y 1y agoNoun druthers pl (plural only) (US, informal, often humorous) Wishes, preferences.
- s1mplicissimus 1y ago[flagged]
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- JdeBP 1y agoThis article is a pile of rubbish from top to toe. Starting with the conflation of TUI with CLI, and ending with the claim that one has to extract it from an archive afresh "each time you want to use it". Microsoft hasn't designed a new text editor to "avoid VIM memes". It has re-implemented its old EDIT editor, which was a DOS program with a PIF on Windows NT, and which came out with MS-DOS 5 in 1991. There weren't silly "VIM memes" in 1991. Indeed, Stevie had barely turned into VIM in 1991. The original announcement was discussed on Hacker News about a month ago. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529 And the idea that "Windows devs are forced to fire up Notepad" is just risible. Even by 1991 there was a wide array of text editors available in the Microsoft world. EDIT was over half a decade late to the party. DR-DOS had had EDITOR for a while. And if memory serves E and T2 were already in IBM's PC-DOS and OS/2. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44041533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44041533 It was pointed out back in 1991 that it was late to the party. Quite how someone from the world of Ubuntu can think that there are no text editors in the Windows world in 2025 apart from Notepad and so developers are "forced", its word, to use it, boggles the mind. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44037559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44037559 Anyone who actually does Windows development, and has probably discussed with other developers the merits of the various editors available, from MobaEdit through EditPad, WordPad, Brief, CodeWriter, and many others to Notepad++, would question the apparently zero knowledge that has informed this piece.
- croes 1y ago> Windows devs are forced to fire up Notepad I think that’s a joke
- tialaramex 1y agoAlthough there are vim memes, the whole "Oh no, I'm trapped in the editor" problem with modal editors is certainly there for vi which begins in the 1970s. By 1994 when I was first using vi, (not vim) the rather faded "cheat sheet" I was handed already had remarks about the need to teach beginners how to leave the editor. I think I went years writing :q! which isn't the fastest way out but does do what I meant.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y agoApropos of the shortcuts here, I always wonder why developers don't go out of their way more often to memorize the Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, ... shortcuts in use basically everywhere today except the terminal. I believe they stem from the IBM Common User Access (CUA) design standard. In particular the fact that Ctrl + anything letter-oriented makes something that is word-oriented instead, for example Ctrl + Left Arrow and Ctrl + Right Arrow let you skip word-by-word in documents, and Ctrl + Backspace lets you delete entire words at a time. This feels like it should be way more common knowledge than it is, like how copying and pasting any multiline document into your browser's URL bar will almost certainly format it into a sane single-line format.
- slashdave 1y ago> Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V You mean CMD+C and CMD+V, right?
- smokel 1y agoThere are even developers who do not learn to touch type. Baffles the mind. Making Caps Lock an additional Ctrl, and using Emacs keybindings (supported in nearly every IDE and on many command lines) makes one even more productive, because your hand doesn't have to travel all the way to where the arrow keys are. (A similar thing can be said about Vi keybindings.) It is a strange phenomenon that many people do not wish to invest a few hours to make their lives easier later on.
- croemer 1y agoYeo. I map capslock to Esc and use vi bindings.
- spauldo 1y agoIt baffles my mind that a lot of schools don't even offer keyboarding anymore. I took it in high school, and I was fortunate to be born late enough that being male wasn't a barrier (only girls could take it when my parents were in school) but early enough that they offered it at all. Out of all the skills I learned in high school, it's probably the one I use the most.
- neoden 1y agoWhat font is on the screenshot? https://github.com/microsoft/edit https://github.com/microsoft/edit
- muziq 1y agoCascadia Code ? https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
- moefh 1y agoThat's not it, the lower case 'a' is very different.
- CactusRocket 1y agoCould it be Consolas? It would make sense I believe it's the default monospace font on recent Windows.
- wlkr 1y agoI think it's Maple Mono. https://font.subf.dev/en/ https://font.subf.dev/en/ https://github.com/subframe7536/maple-font https://github.com/subframe7536/maple-font
- lhecker 1y agoIt's indeed Maple Mono. I love that font!
- felineflock 1y agoI appreciate the effort that went into writing the article but it conflates different concepts missing some historical context and technical distinctions. For example, TUI (text user interface) and CLI (command-line interface) are quite different. "CLI Text Editor" sounds more like someone editing a file using ECHO commands. This new editor is actually a reimplementation of the classic MS-DOS 5 EDIT program from 1991. At that time, VIM was still very new, so "VIM memes" weren't yet part of the tech landscape. Before VIM, there was vi. In Usenet posts - about 15 years before Google - people used to add a pithy humorous sentence at the bottom called "tagline" - here is one: "How do you exit vi? Reboot the system." And Notepad was not the only option for Windows devs. We've had EDIT, DR-DOS EDITOR, Brief, WordPad, EditPad, Notepad++, and more.
- marttt 1y agoI've long quit using vim on a daily basis, but the "how to exit Vim?" jokes are still somehow funny. A recent encounter was an old tweet by @iamdeveloper: "I've been using Vim for about 2 years now, mostly because I can't figure out how to exit it." :wq (sorry, I had to).
- Jenk 1y ago`ZZ` to save and quit, `ZQ` to quit without saving. Sorry, I can't help myself.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoI've always used :x or :x! and no longer remember why. Probably it's a bad idea like without actually looking right now I think it might mean to ignore permissions (if you're root enough) and just write even if perms would have blocked it. Hm, maybe x means wq and just the ! means force.
- mklein994 1y agoIt's actually a bit more nuanced: `:x` is like `:wq`, but only writes if changes have been made. `:x!` has the same semantics as `:wq!`.
- posix86 1y agoI wish they'd port the windows terminal to linux. It somehow allows to use ctrl + c for both cancelling processes and copying text. I'm still sometimes opening dev tools in chrome bcs of the annoying ctrl + shift + c.
- 3836293648 1y agoJust don't use the C-c clipboard anywhere? If you want consistency, just use the other one?
- drdunce 1y agoAlthough most terminals (stty)/UI wrappers/multiplexers etc. would allow this as a configuration, I believe ElementaryOS and others are deliberately setup out the box to offer a Windows-like experience, including preserving keyboard shorts, without further configuration if this is what you seek.
- tialaramex 1y agoI wish any of the supplied terminals and shells for Windows were even halfway decent. At first I tried really hard to use these tools, since my work laptop runs Windows, but gradually I accepted that no, even the experienced users aren't doing any better, these tools are just worse than the ones I was used to, and so I use a Unix shell and terminals designed to run those shells instead. There were Windows/ Microsoft tools where I found things to like. C# is at least arguably a better Java for example. But a lot of the things I expected to find had benefits were just disappointing.
- zadjii 1y agoWhat complaints do you have with the Windows Terminal specifically? I can get having issues with CMD or PowerShell - they're very non-unix-y. But WT itself is probably one of the most feature-complete terminal emulators out there these days. I'd love to know what you think it's missing
- tialaramex 1y ago
- jll29 1y agoWorks like a breeze. Make sure to add alias edit=msedit to your ~/.profile for full "DOS compatibility".
- declan_roberts 1y agoI love the UI. Its completely unlike vim or eMacs, and a the design makes me nostalgic for the windows 3.0/dos days.
- Y_Y 1y agoIt is certainly nothing like an eMac. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac
- jmmv 1y agoAbout a year ago, I wrote https://open.substack.com/pub/blogsystem5/p/a-cli-text-editor-in-my-windows https://open.substack.com/pub/blogsystem5/p/a-cli-text-edito... , which covered the history of editors in DOS and Windows. The article was sparked precisely by the GitHub issue in which Microsoft was proposing re-adding a text editor to Windows and the heated debate that followed.
- czarit 1y agoReally interesting development approach here. On unix, this depends on _one_ crate: libc. That crate is just a bunch of wrappers for libc. Absolutely everything else is implemented in the project itself. This is kind of baffling - they have their own everything (from base64 library to a cross platform terminal handling system) instead of using well-proven crates like termios. Why? I don't know. But very unusual in the rust world
- easton 1y agoGuessing it’s because it needs to go everywhere Windows is and they didn’t want to have a target on their back from pulling in a bunch of dependencies that they’d have to prove were safe. (Especially since Windows installs where this editor works may not get frequently updated, like embedded) It might have been faster to just write the code they needed vs consult a lawyer and local security person for every crate they wanted to pull in.
- JdeBP 1y agoGo and read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529 . The developer xyrself is in the comments talking about the choices that were made and the alternatives that were considered.
- lelanthran 1y agoThe author answers it themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 I agree with pretty much all of their reasoning.
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