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Edit is now open source

263 pointsby ingve3 days ago

26 comments

computatrum2 days ago
It not only written in Rust, but they avoid basically any dependencies to third-party crates (beside the obligatory windows-sys/libc), optimizing probably for binary size. To achieve this, they seem to re-implement considerable parts of the rust ecosystem (own TUI library implementation, own unicode handling, own arena implementation, ...).
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arghwhat2 days ago
Yay for finally having a default text editor that works over ssh. Managing windows servers over ssh is a bit of a pain without.<p>They could just have packaged nano, but oh well.
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massysett2 days ago
Nitpick - this is a text user oriented (TUI) or a screen editor, not a CLI editor. A CLI editor is ed(1), or ex(1), or EDLIN for MS-DOS lineage.
dbuxton2 days ago
I can&#x27;t wait for the Rust port of QBasic Gorillas
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andrewstuart2 days ago
Edit for DOS was my favorite editor.<p>All the keys worked as you expect. You could select text with shift. It had find and a replace. That’s a lot more than most editors give you without config fiddling and arcane key commands.<p>Those simple things get almost everything I need for operating system maintenance.<p>Edit was the pure distilled essence of an editor.<p>It was a work of art really.
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lhecker2 days ago
Hey all! I made this! I really hope you like it and if you don&#x27;t, please open an issue: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;edit">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;edit</a><p>To respond to some of the questions or those parts I personally find interesting:<p>The custom TUI library is so that I can write a plugin model around a C ABI. Existing TUI frameworks that I found and were popular usually didn&#x27;t map well to plain C. Others were just too large. The arena allocator exists primarily because building trees in Rust is quite annoying otherwise. It doesn&#x27;t use bumpalo, because I took quite the liking to &quot;scratch arenas&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nullprogram.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;27&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nullprogram.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;27&#x2F;</a>) and it&#x27;s really not that difficult to write such an allocator.<p>Regarding the choice of Rust, I actually wrote the prototype in C, C++, Zig, and Rust! Out of these 4 I personally liked Zig the most, followed by C, Rust, and C++ in that order. Since Zig is not internally supported at Microsoft just yet (chain of trust, etc.), I continued writing it in C, but after a while I became quite annoyed by the lack of features that I came to like about Zig. So, I ported it to Rust over a few days, as it is internally supported and really not all that bad either. The reason I didn&#x27;t like Rust so much is because of the rather weak allocator support and how difficult building trees was. I also found the lack of cursors for linked lists in stable Rust rather irritating if I&#x27;m honest. But I would say that I enjoyed it overall.<p>We decided against nano, kilo, micro, yori, and others for various reasons. What we wanted was a small binary so we can ship it with all variants of Windows without extra justifications for the added binary size. It also needed to have decent Unicode support. It should&#x27;ve also been one built around VT output as opposed to Console APIs to allow for seamless integration with SSH. Lastly, first class support for Windows was obviously also quite important. I think out of the listed editors, micro was probably the one we wanted to use the most, but... it&#x27;s just too large. I proposed building our own editor and while it took me roughly twice as long as I had planned, it was still only about 4 months (and a bit for prototyping last year).<p>As GuinansEyebrows put it, it&#x27;s definitely quite a bit of &quot;NIH&quot; in the project, but I also spent all of my weekends on it and I think all of Christmas, simply because I had fun working on it. So, why not have fun learning something new, writing most things myself? I definitely learned tons working on this, which I can now use in other projects as well.<p>If you have any questions, let me know!
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90s_dev2 days ago
Interesting how we always go in circles.<p>edit.cmd was one of the first programs I ever used.<p>Now it&#x27;s back rewritten as a Windows 10+ program in Rust?<p>Yet it looks and works just the same as 30 years ago!
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trinix9122 days ago
I wonder what prevented them from porting the ms-dos EDIT.COM to 64bit Windows back then. There&#x27;s still EDLIN.COM in the 32bit version.
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MonkeyClub2 days ago
The new Microsoft Edit is good. It&#x27;s not as good as EDIT.COM, but it gets the job done.<p>A couple of peeves: it lacks word count (which would be very useful), and there is no way to escape to shell (which would render it more usable for light scripting tasks).<p>I don&#x27;t mind it too much, but I dislike how it hijacks the selected terminal font in Windows Terminal, how you can&#x27;t hit Esc to close the menus in a Linux terminal, and how not all functions can be accessed using the keyboard with direct shortcuts.<p>For example, to change which file you&#x27;re editing, you have to select View &gt; Focus Statusbar, press the left arrow, hit Enter to select the list of edited files, select the file you want to switch to, and press enter. I wonder why there&#x27;s no shortcut for that, which would be a common use case.<p>For a side project, it&#x27;s very nice all around. If these issues were to be fixed, it would be a perfectly adequate editor.<p>Then the only feature missing would be an embedded Lisp interpreter used for automation and extensibility. :)<p>Edit: It has no telemetry, right?
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andyferris2 days ago
I have to say, I really miss MS-DOS TUI apps like edit, the qbasic editor, and xtree-gold.<p>The linux-terminal based ones just seem a bit off in comparison. Maybe it&#x27;s mouse and keyboard support in terminals (shift-enter support, anyone?) aren&#x27;t great? People have different aesthetics? I don&#x27;t know...<p>Next stop: VS-EDIT would be pretty cool :) (This with LSPs)
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thaumasiotes2 days ago
Weird choice of name for their <i>new</i> software, given there is already a pretty prominent editor from Microsoft named &quot;edit&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MS-DOS_Editor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MS-DOS_Editor</a><p>They seem to have given it the same name because they want to preserve the command. But the headline is... misleading.
eviks2 days ago
&gt; While it is relatively simple to learn the magic exit incantation, it’s certainly not a coincidence that this often turns up as a stumbling block for new and old programmers.<p>What’s even simpler is changing the awful defaults and adding the menu to make this a non-issue at a tiny fraction of the time it would take to write a new editor.<p>&gt; we decided that we wanted a modeless editor for Windows (versus a modal editor where new users would have to remember different modes of operation and how to switch between them)<p>New users could do everything in insert mode with the power of modes always in the background. Also you don’t need to remember how to switch as you can just show those key binds in either your menu or status bar if you think it’s very important, there is plenty of space looking at the screenshots<p>Such a wasted opportunity to use something powerful and extensible for rather flimsy reasons
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DangitBobby2 days ago
I love that it has a toolbar with shortcut keys highlighted at the top. I wish more TUI programs had that, especially vim!
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croes2 days ago
And again a case of bad naming from MS because it’s too basic to be distinguishable.
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TZubiri2 days ago
Very nice, I&#x27;ll unironically add it to my repertoire of main code editing tools: nano and notepad.<p>Notepad had recently become infected with ai features and logins and tabs which I just hate, win some lose some ig
JdeBP2 days ago
I have, as they say in the theatre, notes. <i>Lots</i> of notes. Possibly beginning with a request to stop calling these &quot;VT&quot; sequences. Quite a lot of this wouldn&#x27;t work on an actual DEC Video Terminal.<p>One of the questions I haven&#x27;t yet answered from research is whether it supports [Control]+[P]. That&#x27;s another of the non-secret secrets of the original EDIT.
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tored2 days ago
Oh nice! Can&#x27;t wait to replace nano. Plugin support in lua?
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zerr2 days ago
Is there anything in EDIT.EXE for MS-DOS that inherently hinders porting to x64?<p>I wish they have implemented the same color theme as well.
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mixmastamyk2 days ago
What happened to shipping yedit? From the yori project, which I recommend to everyone on windows. Why wait when it has been available for years?<p>(Someone mentioned ssh, which leads me to believe this one is using ansi instead of the console API.)
Ericson23142 days ago
Will the old one from DOS be replaced entirely with this?
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mayli2 days ago
Pretty cool, at least much more user friendly and doesn&#x27;t lag when opening large files. And more features than notepad.
Bilal_io2 days ago
Why didn&#x27;t they make this a package available ia winget? Did it have to be part of the OS?
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pwdisswordfishz2 days ago
And here I was hoping for the original MS-DOS Editor of Windows 95.
GuinansEyebrows2 days ago
cute. extremely NIH in a field with many existing options, but very cute :)
precompute2 days ago
&quot;Edit&quot;. Really? Was that the only name available? I am sick of these companies repurposing very common computing terms for their mediocre products.
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bitbasher2 days ago
It&#x27;s 2025 and Windows got what *nix got in the 1970s. Better late than never!
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