This 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

More notes here: 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

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-...

I 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.

Apropos 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.

Does 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.

I 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

Really 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

Works like a breeze.

Make sure to add

  alias edit=msedit

I wonder if anyone has ever given any druthers to porting PC-Write to linux ..

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 ..

About a year ago, I wrote 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.

I 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.

Is it only the keyboard shortcuts that they’re borrowing from VS code? I hope they have plans for LSP and extensibility.

I love the UI. Its completely unlike vim or eMacs, and a the design makes me nostalgic for the windows 3.0/dos days.

What font is on the screenshot? https://github.com/microsoft/edit

I'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".

That sound you hear is all the old men yelling at clouds that a full screen terminal editor is not a CLI editor.

Ff

This 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

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

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

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.

Will 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.