this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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The brand new Microsoft Edit, which is the successor of the old MS-DOS-editor will come soon to Linux as well?

There is a discussion going on how to call ms edit executable under Linux at: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/341

Microsoft Edit is fully written in Rust. And the source-code is actually fully open-source as well under MIT license 😮.

I personally would like see them calling it dos-edit or just dosedit, since that would be kinda funny. But I understand it will be called ms-edit instead.

I know Linux already has vi, vim, neovim and nano, ... and more... However is kind of ironic to see this binary be shipped to Linux distros. Of course it's already added to Arch btw: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ms-edit-git

Official GitHub page.

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[–] StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Ok. Was this just a case of someone seeing if they can? Because my only thought here is “Why?”

[–] superfes@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's really small, can easily replace nano

[–] StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That it can fit on a 5 1/4" floppy with room to spare might have been important once, but I think we are long past that point. Micro takes 5 MB, Nano 3.

Looking into it further it looks a bit like NIH syndrome. Here's Microsoft's explanation: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-source/

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Why build another CLI editor?
What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows. 32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS editor, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox. From there, we narrowed down our options…
Many of you are probably familiar with the “How do I exit vim?” meme. 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.
Because we wanted to avoid this for a built-in default editor, we decided that we wanted a modeless editor for Windows (versus a modal editor where new users would have to remember different modes of operation and how to switch between them). This unfortunately limited our choices to a list of editors that either had no first-party support for Windows or were too big to bundle them with every version of the OS. As a result, Edit was born.

TL;DR: We tried nothing and were all out of options.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I actually understand why Microsoft would create their own terminal editor again. It kinda make sense and they now have it fully in their own control.

Not only it the binary under the magic 200k file size limit. They can now also better integrate it with windows and their key bindings etc.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Why didn't they write this instead of the BS above?

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 1 week ago

They didn't ask me 🤔

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