22 ms·

Microsoft Edit

486 points by ethanpil 1y ago

90s_dev 1y ago
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.
- vunderba 1y ago
  The possibility of using WASM was at least under discussion last month: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17
waltercool 1y ago
[dead]
pmarreck 1y ago
I love TUI's lately. I just wish this was on nixpkgs
- pmarreck 1y ago
  EDIT: I made a PR to add a working flake.nix/flake.lock file https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534
guerrilla 1y ago
Maybe this makes up for them destroying Notepad for some people.
anyfoo 1y ago
Fun. I must admit I don't really know who this is for, but it seems fun.
- DrJokepu 1y ago
  It’s right there in the readme actually: > The goal is to provide an accessible editor that even users largely unfamiliar with terminals can easily use.
  - scblock 1y ago
    That may be the written goal, but I doubt that's the actual reason the project exists.
    - cosignal 1y ago
      Yeah ... I don't think there's any overlap between "users largely unfamiliar with terminals" who want something easy to use, and 'Linux users who are sufficiently technical that they would even hear about this repo'.
      - cAtte_ 1y ago
        well the editor was obviously designed primarily for Windows, not sure why the title says Linux
      - zamadatix 1y ago
        The title is a bit confusing depending how you read it. Edit isn't "for" Linux any more than PowerShell was made for Linux to displace bash, zsh, fish, and so on. Both are just also available with binaries "for" Linux. The previous HN posts which linked to the blog post explaining the tool's background and reason for existing on Windows cover it all a lot better than a random title pointing to the repo.
        egorfine 1y ago
        TIL PowerShell exists for Linux. But.. why?
        skc 1y ago
orsenthil 1y ago
So much excitement that this got posted 3 times in a week 1. By the author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 2. Ubuntu Publication - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44306892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44306892 And this post.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  There is also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44341462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44341462
pxc 1y ago
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. -- 1: https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
- seabrookmx 1y ago
  IMO it should not. `edit` doesn't even support syntax highlighting (atleast, out of the box when I tried it).
  - Litruv 1y ago
    I think you missed the point of edit.
    - bapak 1y ago
      I think not. Edit is to edit files in the terminal. What kind of files do you expect people to edit in the terminal? Most certainly files that would benefit from colors, not prose.
      - shakna 1y ago
        A lot of authors, myself included, want a "distraction free" editor. Its a whole over-populated market segment. Prose thrives in the terminal. Ice and Fire was written in WordStar, as just one popular example.
        antonvs 1y ago
        Is that why the series ground to a halt
        shakna 1y ago
        > “I’m 12 years late on this damn novel, and I’m struggling with it,” he said. “I have like 1,100 pages written, but I still have hundreds more pages to go. It’s a big mother of a book for whatever reason. Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this, but it’s tough.” He's averaging a hundred pages a year. Maybe not the fastest, but certainly not the slowest writer. With the size of his books... Cut the guy some slack.
jksmith 1y ago
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.
- throwaway127482 1y ago
  I am curious about how you made money with it, if you don't mind sharing.
  - jksmith 1y ago
    My first company out of uni was a company that sold a tv advertising application written in dos. It did all the reports, put together spot advert packages, measuring reach and frequency, cost per point, etc. Used Neilsen ratings for data. The company at the time paid commissions along with salary to programmers. The app still lives on in windows, but I've been out of that game for decades. Written in TP for dos, then Delphi for windows.
    - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
      Honestly dude, this is clever. Good on you for finding an opportunity to make a useful tool and you made out like a bandit in the process. :)
      - jksmith 1y ago
        That was the toolchain that my company used. Turbo vision was a Borland product, back when Philippe Khan was running the company. We were that ahead of the curve for "shrinkwrapped software development" at the time. That legacy, Delphi and FPC still maintain the standard for desktop, native dev, really for the last 30 years.
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
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.
- easton 1y ago
  disclaimer: I used to commit to winget a lot and now I don’t. …but is it really less secure than brew or choco? The installers are coming from reasonably trusted sources and are scanned for malware by MS, a community contributor has to approve the manifest changes, and the manifests themselves can’t contain arbitrary code outside of the linked executable. Feels about as good as you can get without requiring the ISVs themselves to maintain repos.
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    The installers are coming from random people on the Internet. Most software repositories have trusted contributors and a policy of requiring a piece of software be arguably worthy of inclusion. Perhaps because Microsoft is afraid to pick winners, every piece of garbage is allowed on winget, and there's no way to restrict who can make changes to what packages. There are ISVs that would like to lock down their software so they can maintain it but a trillion dollar company couldn't spare a dollar to figure out a "business process" to do this. As far as I know, Microsoft has a single employee involved who has laughed off any security concerns with "well the automated malware scanner would find it". The "community contributors" were just... people active on GitHub when they launched it. Was anyone vetted in any way? No. The Microsoft Store has actual app reviewers, winget has... "eh, lgtm".
    - 90s_dev 1y ago
      The policy of including the author's name next to the project name, along with some indication that it really is the author and not an imposter, I think that's probably the best we're ever going to get, since at that point it just comes down to community trust.
486sx33 1y ago
Why should “ms-edit” be avoided ?
LAC-Tech 1y ago
Needs LSP and Tree-Sitter :)
- z3ratul163071 1y ago
  and scripting :)
  - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    I'd quite like to see VSCode for the terminal.
  - trinix912 1y ago
    Oh yes, it needs VBScript support ;)
- oliverkwebb 1y ago
  If the editor focused on becoming an IDE instead of being idiot-proof and cleanly designed, what would distinguish it from the 1,000 other editor projects?
jedisct1 1y ago
Probably entirely AI-generated.
kgwxd 1y ago
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.
pcunite 1y ago
Back in 1993, I would open up binary files in edit and enjoy seeing hearts.
- samplatt 1y ago
  That, the DOS defrag visualisation, and the hex-editing my own savegames is pretty much why I'm a developer today.
  - diggan 1y ago
    Ah, the memory of going to bed while the 500MB harddrive defrags over-night, sleeping next to the endless clicking and spinning
xyst 1y ago
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.
- watusername 1y ago
  You are not the target audience. This is aimed at casual users and beginners, and it's already in a good shape to replace nano with its user-friendly, mouse-enabled TUI.
  - encom 1y ago
    >in a good shape to replace nano ... Anyways, here's how to tell if your LED sign is cheap!
- legends2k 1y ago
  Huge +1, same for me, but with GNU Emacs instead of neovim but can completely appreciate the philosophy.
- pmarreck 1y ago
  Sell me on Neovim. It blipped on my radar recently when I did a sidequest into LuaJIT. Also, just made a PR to add Nix flake support to Edit: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534
adavidoaiei 1y ago
[dead]
umeshunni 1y ago
Can this be ported to MacOS?
- watusername 1y ago
  It already works? There just isn't an official build yet - just `cargo run` yourself.
- jll29 1y ago
  219232 bytes binary if compiled for Apple silicon (ARM).
- stuaxo 1y ago
  Its pretty easy to build there, I've tried this on MacOS and Linux. The one thing that vexed me for something based on edit, was CTRL+P being hijacked for something that isn't print, is like we forgot about about CUA over the last 15 years.
  - dgellow 1y ago
    Not an emacs user I assume?
- ioma8 1y ago
  It works on MacOs since it was published some two weeks ago. I have been using it since then.
- pmarreck 1y ago
  I use nix-darwin on macos and just made a PR for nix flake support, which works on my macos: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 Note that another editor called Micro is very similar: https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
No musl binary. For glibc Linux distributions only perhaps.
- rahen 1y ago
  Just build it yourself. Or you can install glibc on both Void and Alpine, if you want the pre-built binary.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  What about BSD
fsniper 1y ago
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.
- red_admiral 1y ago
  The copy command is called "copy" which kind of makes sense? I remember once seeing a colleagues .bashrc with things like "alias copy=cp". Flags won't work the same way of course. Sure "chcp" is a mouthful, but "del" or "erase" makes as much sense as learning that "rm" is short for remove. You pick up either convention quickly enough, except that I'm constantly using "where" when I meant "which". Maybe I should make an alias or something. Don't get me started on powershell's look-we-can-use-proper-words-lets-see-how-long-we-can-make-this.
- delfinom 1y ago
  >I have no idea how this flys. They aren't trademarking it and probably can't. But there's no reason they anyone can't use generic naming for their products. Many software applications do and quite frankly its more descriptive to attracting new users than coming up with non-real names. I would aruge the only reason made up names exist is to keep marketing departments employed trying to explain to users what they are needlessly.
- not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
  I know what you mean but everyone does this. Apple has Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. Google has Drive, Docs, Sheets, etc. Meta has Messenger. Far too many examples to list. Conversely, it would be ridiculous to use non-obvious names.
  - fsniper 1y ago
    In fact you are right! Somehow This didn't register. Thank you.
- athom 1y ago
  The one I love is Microsoft's project manager, MS... ...wait for it... ...Project. Was charged with managing a department-wide installation about fifteen years back, now. You want to have fun looking for relevant docs, try a search on "Microsoft Project". Good times! I think the one exception to Microsoft's generic naming convention is Excel. Visio probably qualifies, too, but they bought that from someone else. Oh, and I guess PowerPoint, too.
tempire 1y ago
fake. it's not blue.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Believe you could change the background color in DOS edit.
andrewstuart 1y ago
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.
pulkitsh1234 1y ago
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?
- dark-star 1y ago
  As they explained, they needed a text editor that works in a command line (for Windows Core server installs), works across SSH (because for a while now Windows included an SSH Server so you can completely manage it through SSH), and can be used by non-vi-experienced Windows administrators (i.e. a modeless editor).
  - llarsson 1y ago
    Telling people to use nano would of course have been next to impossible. Much easier to rewrite a DOS-era editor in Rust, naturally.
    - dark-star 1y ago
      does nano support mouse usage? It doesn't seem to work for me (but maybe it just needs to be enabled somewhere) I guess they thought that inheriting 25 years of C code was more trouble than designing a new editor from scratch. But you'd have to ask the devs why they decided to go down that route
      - Elfener 1y ago
        > does nano support mouse usage? Yes, but you have to put `set mouse` into your nanorc.
    - red_admiral 1y ago
      This way gets coolness points, HN headlines, makes the programmers who wrote it happy, and probably is a contribution to making a couple of autistic people feel included. Rust + EDITOR.COM is kind of like remaking/remastering an old video game.
herbst 1y ago
Did anyone ask for yet another a Microsoft editor on your Linux machine?
gadders 1y ago
Do Edlin next. Reminds me of my days on a support line. "Type edit autoexec.bat....." etc
- trinix912 1y ago
  And DEBUG. It's sad we no longer have a debugger/(dis)assembler/binary editor bundled with Windows. That thing was tiny but you could do so much with it.
red_admiral 1y ago
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.
- gnubison 1y ago
  I think ed is what you’re looking for (possibly with -s).
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    Ironically, given the mention of vi, it is ex that is what red_admiral is looking for. (-:
napolux 1y ago
oh, the memories. gorilla.bas :)
- boobsbr 1y ago
  also, nibbles.bas
- homebrewer 1y ago
  It can still be played in a browser: https://archive.org/details/GorillasQbasic https://archive.org/details/GorillasQbasic
wasimanitoba 1y ago
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.
- saturn5k 1y ago
  I stopped using Notepad since they introduced tabs.
- dwattttt 1y ago
  I recall reading Raymond Chen mentioning that Notepad actually gets more exercise than you'd expect; it's a common guinea pig for features: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Unfortunately, the new Edit isn't safe from such decisions. While Satya might have made the change Microsoft <3 FOSS, the Gates/Balmer era was much better towards Windows developers. Now we have a schizophrenia of Web and Desktop frameworks, and themselves hardly use them, what used to be a comfortable VS wizard, or plugin, now is e.g. a CLI tool that dumps an Excel file, showing that newer blood has hardly any Windows development culture, or their upper management.
  - CineSnaccs 1y ago
    I don't know how many people don't know this, but now you actually can't release app on Windows without it showing your warning while installing unless you sign it with EV certificates, which cost upwards of 500$ for a year. As you may have guessed, this simply pushes out smaller devs. This used to NOT be like this. It should NOT be like this.
    - wronex 1y ago
      I would highly recommend looking into Azure code signing. It is confusing to set up. But comes with instant reputation and ”only” costs 10$ a month. EV certificates has always felt like an utter scam and extortion to me. At least now there is an alternative.
nhinck3 1y ago
Another Microsoft nerd-washing project.
- imbnwa 1y ago
  'nerd-washing' such a great term
  - pmarreck 1y ago
    can someone explain this one to me? if I had to guess, it's implied open-source-nerd atonement for the closed-source past sins of Microsoft, or something?
    - nhinck3 1y ago
      More or less, but for current and past sins. Much like green and sports washing.
masfoobar 1y ago
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...
- repler 1y ago
  > I am surprised Micrsooft didnt use the opportunity to create a micrsoft specific Linux distro The last one didn’t do so hot, they named it “Xenix”
  - arexxbifs 1y ago
    It was a lousy distro, it didn't even include the Linux kernel! On the other hand, according to AT&T, Xenix accounted for about half of the worldwide Unix licenses in the late 1980s.
  - bdcravens 1y ago
    That wasn't Linux. Unix != Linux.
- subjectsigma 1y ago
  I would venture a guess that the name recognition helps them. No developer wants to install a distro they’ve never heard of, but they do want to install Ubuntu. If WSL supports Ubuntu then they can cash in on that.
Fokamul 1y ago
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.
- pmarreck 1y ago
  What it reminds me most of actually is Micro. Which is pretty neat. https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
- masfuerte 1y ago
  Nano is a bare-bones editor with its own wacky key-bindings. What is the point? If I want to learn new key-bindings I'll learn a full-featured editor. msedit's key-bindings are based on IBM CUA. It's immediately familiar to a great many people.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Nano can be configured with CUA keybindings, I do it. But I’m glad someone wrote one of these in rust.
cyberwaj 1y ago
story in the news already https://digitrendz.blog/newswire/technology/19460/microsoft-revives-classic-ms-dos-text-editor-for-linux-users/ https://digitrendz.blog/newswire/technology/19460/microsoft-...
amelius 1y ago
Was hoping for MS-DOS editor with built-in LLM.
scoopr 1y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 1y ago
  edit was a godsend after the `copy con` days
  - naikrovek 1y ago
    I remember using edlin a lot in my early computing days. It was murder to learn but once you knew how to wield it, it was excellent. I don’t know why I was forced to learn that but I needed it for something and stuck to it the entire time I used DOS for anything. And people were in awe when you used it while they watched. “What the hell was that!?”
- mysterydip 1y ago
  It may not have had syntax highlighting, but it did have syntax capitalization (for lack of a better term?). If you typed a line in all lowercase, after hitting enter it would automatically uppercase the reserved words. It wasn't much, but it helped
- JdeBP 1y ago
ubermonkey 1y ago
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.
- riffic 1y ago
  agreed. it's nostalgic sure but it's not a good editor.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    It’s for fixing boot.ini on a broken headless vm at 2am, not for software development.
kspacewalk2 1y ago
How long until it becomes Copilot 365 Edit?
csense 1y ago
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)
Aldipower 1y ago
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.
nhatcher 1y ago
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!
- joshka 1y ago
  Literally no deps except for a few dev-deps that make testing easier. That's a reasonable thing for something that you ship as a fundamental tool to be used by administrators as part of an OS like windows. Take a look for lhecker's [1] responses for more info on the not invented here stuff. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lhecker https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lhecker
ashoeafoot 1y ago
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.
0x0 1y ago
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...
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Maybe using ucs2 encoding, instead of utf8?
dbuxton 1y ago
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.
majkinetor 1y ago
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.
- DSMan195276 1y ago
  Agree 100%, that's the biggest difference I feel whenever I'm doing remote Powershell vs. ssh, it always feels like a struggle just to make basic file modifications.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
bluedino 1y ago
> This editor pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor Oddly, it looks more like Borland's editor.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  TurboVision had horizontal scrollbars. Edit never did.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/microsoft-surprises-ms-dos-fans-with-remake-of-ancient-text-editor-that-works-on-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/microsoft-surprises-... The screen shot says differently.
DrNosferatu 1y ago
Any Flatpak or Snap editions?
tmaly 1y ago
Was this made just cause someone wanted to do something in Rust?
- JdeBP 1y ago
  No. The developer actually chose Zig initially. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
oliverkwebb 1y ago
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.
parliament32 1y ago
The lengths people will go just to not have to learn Vim continues to surprise me.
gnabgib 1y ago
Discussion (271 points, 1 month ago, 185 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529
kasajian 1y ago
I'm just waiting for this thing to turn into an IDE like Turbo C 2.0 ( https://imgur.com/5vyPZdO 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access )
- christophergray 1y ago
  https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/ https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/ is a TUI editor with something similar to CUA.

486 points by ethanpil 1y ago

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.

vunderba 1y ago
The possibility of using WASM was at least under discussion last month: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17

waltercool 1y ago

[dead]

pmarreck 1y ago

I love TUI's lately. I just wish this was on nixpkgs

pmarreck 1y ago
EDIT: I made a PR to add a working flake.nix/flake.lock file https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534

guerrilla 1y ago

Maybe this makes up for them destroying Notepad for some people.

anyfoo 1y ago

Fun. I must admit I don't really know who this is for, but it seems fun.

DrJokepu 1y ago
It’s right there in the readme actually: > The goal is to provide an accessible editor that even users largely unfamiliar with terminals can easily use.
- scblock 1y ago
  That may be the written goal, but I doubt that's the actual reason the project exists.
  - cosignal 1y ago
    Yeah ... I don't think there's any overlap between "users largely unfamiliar with terminals" who want something easy to use, and 'Linux users who are sufficiently technical that they would even hear about this repo'.
    - cAtte_ 1y ago
      well the editor was obviously designed primarily for Windows, not sure why the title says Linux
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      The title is a bit confusing depending how you read it. Edit isn't "for" Linux any more than PowerShell was made for Linux to displace bash, zsh, fish, and so on. Both are just also available with binaries "for" Linux. The previous HN posts which linked to the blog post explaining the tool's background and reason for existing on Windows cover it all a lot better than a random title pointing to the repo.
      - egorfine 1y ago
        TIL PowerShell exists for Linux. But.. why?
        skc 1y ago

orsenthil 1y ago

So much excitement that this got posted 3 times in a week 1. By the author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 2. Ubuntu Publication - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44306892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44306892 And this post.

johannes1234321 1y ago
There is also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44341462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44341462

pxc 1y ago

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. -- 1: https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/

seabrookmx 1y ago
IMO it should not. `edit` doesn't even support syntax highlighting (atleast, out of the box when I tried it).
- Litruv 1y ago
  I think you missed the point of edit.
  - bapak 1y ago
    I think not. Edit is to edit files in the terminal. What kind of files do you expect people to edit in the terminal? Most certainly files that would benefit from colors, not prose.
    - shakna 1y ago
      A lot of authors, myself included, want a "distraction free" editor. Its a whole over-populated market segment. Prose thrives in the terminal. Ice and Fire was written in WordStar, as just one popular example.
      - antonvs 1y ago
        Is that why the series ground to a halt
        shakna 1y ago
        > “I’m 12 years late on this damn novel, and I’m struggling with it,” he said. “I have like 1,100 pages written, but I still have hundreds more pages to go. It’s a big mother of a book for whatever reason. Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this, but it’s tough.” He's averaging a hundred pages a year. Maybe not the fastest, but certainly not the slowest writer. With the size of his books... Cut the guy some slack.

jksmith 1y ago

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.

throwaway127482 1y ago
I am curious about how you made money with it, if you don't mind sharing.
- jksmith 1y ago
  My first company out of uni was a company that sold a tv advertising application written in dos. It did all the reports, put together spot advert packages, measuring reach and frequency, cost per point, etc. Used Neilsen ratings for data. The company at the time paid commissions along with salary to programmers. The app still lives on in windows, but I've been out of that game for decades. Written in TP for dos, then Delphi for windows.
  - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
    Honestly dude, this is clever. Good on you for finding an opportunity to make a useful tool and you made out like a bandit in the process. :)
    - jksmith 1y ago
      That was the toolchain that my company used. Turbo vision was a Borland product, back when Philippe Khan was running the company. We were that ahead of the curve for "shrinkwrapped software development" at the time. That legacy, Delphi and FPC still maintain the standard for desktop, native dev, really for the last 30 years.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago

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.

easton 1y ago
disclaimer: I used to commit to winget a lot and now I don’t. …but is it really less secure than brew or choco? The installers are coming from reasonably trusted sources and are scanned for malware by MS, a community contributor has to approve the manifest changes, and the manifests themselves can’t contain arbitrary code outside of the linked executable. Feels about as good as you can get without requiring the ISVs themselves to maintain repos.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  The installers are coming from random people on the Internet. Most software repositories have trusted contributors and a policy of requiring a piece of software be arguably worthy of inclusion. Perhaps because Microsoft is afraid to pick winners, every piece of garbage is allowed on winget, and there's no way to restrict who can make changes to what packages. There are ISVs that would like to lock down their software so they can maintain it but a trillion dollar company couldn't spare a dollar to figure out a "business process" to do this. As far as I know, Microsoft has a single employee involved who has laughed off any security concerns with "well the automated malware scanner would find it". The "community contributors" were just... people active on GitHub when they launched it. Was anyone vetted in any way? No. The Microsoft Store has actual app reviewers, winget has... "eh, lgtm".
  - 90s_dev 1y ago
    The policy of including the author's name next to the project name, along with some indication that it really is the author and not an imposter, I think that's probably the best we're ever going to get, since at that point it just comes down to community trust.

486sx33 1y ago

Why should “ms-edit” be avoided ?

LAC-Tech 1y ago

Needs LSP and Tree-Sitter :)

z3ratul163071 1y ago
and scripting :)
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  I'd quite like to see VSCode for the terminal.
- trinix912 1y ago
  Oh yes, it needs VBScript support ;)
oliverkwebb 1y ago
If the editor focused on becoming an IDE instead of being idiot-proof and cleanly designed, what would distinguish it from the 1,000 other editor projects?

jedisct1 1y ago

Probably entirely AI-generated.

kgwxd 1y ago

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.

pcunite 1y ago

Back in 1993, I would open up binary files in edit and enjoy seeing hearts.

samplatt 1y ago
That, the DOS defrag visualisation, and the hex-editing my own savegames is pretty much why I'm a developer today.
- diggan 1y ago
  Ah, the memory of going to bed while the 500MB harddrive defrags over-night, sleeping next to the endless clicking and spinning

xyst 1y ago

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.

watusername 1y ago
You are not the target audience. This is aimed at casual users and beginners, and it's already in a good shape to replace nano with its user-friendly, mouse-enabled TUI.
- encom 1y ago
  >in a good shape to replace nano ... Anyways, here's how to tell if your LED sign is cheap!
legends2k 1y ago
Huge +1, same for me, but with GNU Emacs instead of neovim but can completely appreciate the philosophy.
pmarreck 1y ago
Sell me on Neovim. It blipped on my radar recently when I did a sidequest into LuaJIT. Also, just made a PR to add Nix flake support to Edit: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534

adavidoaiei 1y ago

[dead]

umeshunni 1y ago

Can this be ported to MacOS?

watusername 1y ago
It already works? There just isn't an official build yet - just `cargo run` yourself.
jll29 1y ago
219232 bytes binary if compiled for Apple silicon (ARM).
stuaxo 1y ago
Its pretty easy to build there, I've tried this on MacOS and Linux. The one thing that vexed me for something based on edit, was CTRL+P being hijacked for something that isn't print, is like we forgot about about CUA over the last 15 years.
- dgellow 1y ago
  Not an emacs user I assume?
ioma8 1y ago
It works on MacOs since it was published some two weeks ago. I have been using it since then.
pmarreck 1y ago
I use nix-darwin on macos and just made a PR for nix flake support, which works on my macos: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/534 Note that another editor called Micro is very similar: https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

No musl binary. For glibc Linux distributions only perhaps.

rahen 1y ago
Just build it yourself. Or you can install glibc on both Void and Alpine, if you want the pre-built binary.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
What about BSD

fsniper 1y ago

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.

red_admiral 1y ago
The copy command is called "copy" which kind of makes sense? I remember once seeing a colleagues .bashrc with things like "alias copy=cp". Flags won't work the same way of course. Sure "chcp" is a mouthful, but "del" or "erase" makes as much sense as learning that "rm" is short for remove. You pick up either convention quickly enough, except that I'm constantly using "where" when I meant "which". Maybe I should make an alias or something. Don't get me started on powershell's look-we-can-use-proper-words-lets-see-how-long-we-can-make-this.
delfinom 1y ago
>I have no idea how this flys. They aren't trademarking it and probably can't. But there's no reason they anyone can't use generic naming for their products. Many software applications do and quite frankly its more descriptive to attracting new users than coming up with non-real names. I would aruge the only reason made up names exist is to keep marketing departments employed trying to explain to users what they are needlessly.
not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
I know what you mean but everyone does this. Apple has Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. Google has Drive, Docs, Sheets, etc. Meta has Messenger. Far too many examples to list. Conversely, it would be ridiculous to use non-obvious names.
- fsniper 1y ago
  In fact you are right! Somehow This didn't register. Thank you.
athom 1y ago
The one I love is Microsoft's project manager, MS... ...wait for it... ...Project. Was charged with managing a department-wide installation about fifteen years back, now. You want to have fun looking for relevant docs, try a search on "Microsoft Project". Good times! I think the one exception to Microsoft's generic naming convention is Excel. Visio probably qualifies, too, but they bought that from someone else. Oh, and I guess PowerPoint, too.

tempire 1y ago

fake. it's not blue.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Believe you could change the background color in DOS edit.

andrewstuart 1y ago

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.

pulkitsh1234 1y ago

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?

dark-star 1y ago
As they explained, they needed a text editor that works in a command line (for Windows Core server installs), works across SSH (because for a while now Windows included an SSH Server so you can completely manage it through SSH), and can be used by non-vi-experienced Windows administrators (i.e. a modeless editor).
- llarsson 1y ago
  Telling people to use nano would of course have been next to impossible. Much easier to rewrite a DOS-era editor in Rust, naturally.
  - dark-star 1y ago
    does nano support mouse usage? It doesn't seem to work for me (but maybe it just needs to be enabled somewhere) I guess they thought that inheriting 25 years of C code was more trouble than designing a new editor from scratch. But you'd have to ask the devs why they decided to go down that route
    - Elfener 1y ago
      > does nano support mouse usage? Yes, but you have to put `set mouse` into your nanorc.
  - red_admiral 1y ago
    This way gets coolness points, HN headlines, makes the programmers who wrote it happy, and probably is a contribution to making a couple of autistic people feel included. Rust + EDITOR.COM is kind of like remaking/remastering an old video game.

herbst 1y ago

Did anyone ask for yet another a Microsoft editor on your Linux machine?

gadders 1y ago

Do Edlin next. Reminds me of my days on a support line. "Type edit autoexec.bat....." etc

trinix912 1y ago
And DEBUG. It's sad we no longer have a debugger/(dis)assembler/binary editor bundled with Windows. That thing was tiny but you could do so much with it.

red_admiral 1y ago

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.

gnubison 1y ago
I think ed is what you’re looking for (possibly with -s).
- JdeBP 1y ago
  Ironically, given the mention of vi, it is ex that is what red_admiral is looking for. (-:

napolux 1y ago

oh, the memories. gorilla.bas :)

boobsbr 1y ago
also, nibbles.bas
homebrewer 1y ago
It can still be played in a browser: https://archive.org/details/GorillasQbasic https://archive.org/details/GorillasQbasic

wasimanitoba 1y ago

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.

saturn5k 1y ago
I stopped using Notepad since they introduced tabs.
dwattttt 1y ago
I recall reading Raymond Chen mentioning that Notepad actually gets more exercise than you'd expect; it's a common guinea pig for features: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
pjmlp 1y ago
Unfortunately, the new Edit isn't safe from such decisions. While Satya might have made the change Microsoft <3 FOSS, the Gates/Balmer era was much better towards Windows developers. Now we have a schizophrenia of Web and Desktop frameworks, and themselves hardly use them, what used to be a comfortable VS wizard, or plugin, now is e.g. a CLI tool that dumps an Excel file, showing that newer blood has hardly any Windows development culture, or their upper management.
- CineSnaccs 1y ago
  I don't know how many people don't know this, but now you actually can't release app on Windows without it showing your warning while installing unless you sign it with EV certificates, which cost upwards of 500$ for a year. As you may have guessed, this simply pushes out smaller devs. This used to NOT be like this. It should NOT be like this.
  - wronex 1y ago
    I would highly recommend looking into Azure code signing. It is confusing to set up. But comes with instant reputation and ”only” costs 10$ a month. EV certificates has always felt like an utter scam and extortion to me. At least now there is an alternative.

nhinck3 1y ago

Another Microsoft nerd-washing project.

imbnwa 1y ago
'nerd-washing' such a great term
- pmarreck 1y ago
  can someone explain this one to me? if I had to guess, it's implied open-source-nerd atonement for the closed-source past sins of Microsoft, or something?
  - nhinck3 1y ago
    More or less, but for current and past sins. Much like green and sports washing.

masfoobar 1y ago

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...

repler 1y ago
> I am surprised Micrsooft didnt use the opportunity to create a micrsoft specific Linux distro The last one didn’t do so hot, they named it “Xenix”
- arexxbifs 1y ago
  It was a lousy distro, it didn't even include the Linux kernel! On the other hand, according to AT&T, Xenix accounted for about half of the worldwide Unix licenses in the late 1980s.
- bdcravens 1y ago
  That wasn't Linux. Unix != Linux.
subjectsigma 1y ago
I would venture a guess that the name recognition helps them. No developer wants to install a distro they’ve never heard of, but they do want to install Ubuntu. If WSL supports Ubuntu then they can cash in on that.

Fokamul 1y ago

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.

pmarreck 1y ago
What it reminds me most of actually is Micro. Which is pretty neat. https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
masfuerte 1y ago
Nano is a bare-bones editor with its own wacky key-bindings. What is the point? If I want to learn new key-bindings I'll learn a full-featured editor. msedit's key-bindings are based on IBM CUA. It's immediately familiar to a great many people.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Nano can be configured with CUA keybindings, I do it. But I’m glad someone wrote one of these in rust.

cyberwaj 1y ago

story in the news already https://digitrendz.blog/newswire/technology/19460/microsoft-revives-classic-ms-dos-text-editor-for-linux-users/ https://digitrendz.blog/newswire/technology/19460/microsoft-...

amelius 1y ago

Was hoping for MS-DOS editor with built-in LLM.

scoopr 1y ago

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.

unsupp0rted 1y ago
edit was a godsend after the `copy con` days
- naikrovek 1y ago
  I remember using edlin a lot in my early computing days. It was murder to learn but once you knew how to wield it, it was excellent. I don’t know why I was forced to learn that but I needed it for something and stuck to it the entire time I used DOS for anything. And people were in awe when you used it while they watched. “What the hell was that!?”
mysterydip 1y ago
It may not have had syntax highlighting, but it did have syntax capitalization (for lack of a better term?). If you typed a line in all lowercase, after hitting enter it would automatically uppercase the reserved words. It wasn't much, but it helped
JdeBP 1y ago

ubermonkey 1y ago

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.

riffic 1y ago
agreed. it's nostalgic sure but it's not a good editor.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  It’s for fixing boot.ini on a broken headless vm at 2am, not for software development.

kspacewalk2 1y ago

How long until it becomes Copilot 365 Edit?

csense 1y ago

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)

Aldipower 1y ago

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.

nhatcher 1y ago

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!

joshka 1y ago
Literally no deps except for a few dev-deps that make testing easier. That's a reasonable thing for something that you ship as a fundamental tool to be used by administrators as part of an OS like windows. Take a look for lhecker's [1] responses for more info on the not invented here stuff. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lhecker https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lhecker

ashoeafoot 1y ago

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.

0x0 1y ago

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...

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Maybe using ucs2 encoding, instead of utf8?

dbuxton 1y ago

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.

majkinetor 1y ago

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.

DSMan195276 1y ago
Agree 100%, that's the biggest difference I feel whenever I'm doing remote Powershell vs. ssh, it always feels like a struggle just to make basic file modifications.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

bluedino 1y ago

> This editor pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor Oddly, it looks more like Borland's editor.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
TurboVision had horizontal scrollbars. Edit never did.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/microsoft-surprises-ms-dos-fans-with-remake-of-ancient-text-editor-that-works-on-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/microsoft-surprises-... The screen shot says differently.

DrNosferatu 1y ago

Any Flatpak or Snap editions?

tmaly 1y ago

Was this made just cause someone wanted to do something in Rust?

JdeBP 1y ago
No. The developer actually chose Zig initially. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

oliverkwebb 1y ago

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.

parliament32 1y ago

The lengths people will go just to not have to learn Vim continues to surprise me.

gnabgib 1y ago

Discussion (271 points, 1 month ago, 185 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529

kasajian 1y ago

I'm just waiting for this thing to turn into an IDE like Turbo C 2.0 ( https://imgur.com/5vyPZdO 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access )

christophergray 1y ago
https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/ https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/ is a TUI editor with something similar to CUA.