Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/microsoft-edit-text-editor-ubuntu

by jandeboevrie • 1 year ago

286 305 1 year ago

omgubuntu.co.uk

tedunangst2• 1 year ago

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

JdeBP5• 1 year ago

There have definitely been two so far. (-:

* https://mastodon.social/@cks/114704709419805125

HarHarVeryFunny• 1 year ago

Right - if you can't use it on teletype, then it's not a CLI editor.

seabrookmx• 1 year ago

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

Milpotel• 1 year ago

I used micro for some years but recently switched to https://github.com/craigbarnes/dte. A lesser known, more 90s-like, alternative I used several years ago is ne: https://github.com/vigna/ne/.

pepa65• 1 year ago

Craig Barnes is epic. Great, versatile editor, dte.

sheepscreek2• 1 year ago

Back 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.

adhamsalama2• 1 year ago

There are several AI plugins for Neovim. Copilot's auto complete seems to be working fine.

marssaxman2• 1 year ago

Years 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/

I didn't care about mouse support, though.

aa-jv• 1 year ago

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 ..

Y_Y2• 1 year ago

Noun

druthers pl (plural only)

(US, informal, often humorous) Wishes, preferences.

JdeBP5• 1 year ago

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.

tialaramex3• 1 year ago

Although 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.

croes• 1 year ago

Windows devs are forced to fire up Notepad

I think that’s a joke

hiAndrewQuinn4• 1 year ago

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.

kgwxd• 1 year ago

developers don't go out of their way more often to memorize the Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V

I get freaked out enough seeing devs that can't touch type. Now you're telling me there's a large number that also don't know the copy/paste shortcuts!?

FirmwareBurner5• 1 year ago

devs that can't touch type.

Hey, that's me :)

Out of curiosity, why is this a yardstick for SW developers? I assumed the more valuable skill of the profession would be critical thinking and problem solving skills, not finger dexterity on pressing buttons without looking. That's why I didn't become a secretary or court stenographer.

I mean, a lot of doctors can't hand write for shit, but is that in anyway relevant to being a good doctor?

What about SW devs with handicaps or mobility issues?

Touch typing feels like a pretty niche hill to die on.

petepete2• 1 year ago

Also the number who click around to position the cursor when they could hold ctrl and skip there in a fraction of the time. Same goes for shift and highlighting.

Quarrel• 1 year ago

I'm more worried that there might be lots of devs that can't send a sigint!

lupusreal3• 1 year ago

I know them but I virtually never use them. I've used X for more than 20 years and almost exclusively use the highlight and middle click method (outside of emacs, in which case I use evil bindings)

stronglikedan• 1 year ago

One of my juniors could not only not touch type, but would hit caps lock, type a letter, and hit caps lock again - every time they wanted to capitalize a word. They just happened to go on to become the most successful dev I've ever mentored and have now forgotten about us little guys, but I always wondered if they still did that.

teo_zero2• 1 year ago

I get freaked out enough seeing devs that can't touch type.

Do you get freaked out the same way seeing professional drivers that don't race? I've never related the speed of typing to the quality of coding (maybe to the quantity, but not a reason for being freaked out).

jasonjayr• 1 year ago

Eons ago, Ctrl-C was mapped to 'Break' on various terminals, which will halt the running program, and was a useful function. Desktop/GUI's mapped Ctrl-C to (C)opy, since the mnemonic made way more sense, and interrupting a GUI program hard like Break tends to do was not very useful.

yoz-y• 1 year ago

This is where I find cmd+c/v better. It just works everywhere. On windows win+v works, not sure if win+c does, it’s been a while.

vintermann2• 1 year ago

It's not just the mnemonic, it's also that the location on the keyboard makes ctrl-c "prime real estate" so to say, and cutting and pasting is one of the most common and useful things you do.

fc417fc8024• 1 year ago

Also worth noting that many other ctrl-letter combinations map to signals in the terminal. In all the terminal emulators that I've used shift-ctrl-c & co are mapped by default for clipboard operations.

ZoomZoomZoom• 1 year ago

and interrupting a GUI program hard like Break tends to do was not very useful.

I find it extremely useful, GUI or not. Too bad it doesn't work half the time when it matters, especially on Windows.

lupusreal3• 1 year ago

The mnemonic logic of the copy shortcut is undermined by the arbitrary paste shortcut. Also, from what I've seem a whole lot of average Joe computer users don't know or use these shortcuts, I think they're a lot further to the power user side of the skill spectrum than a lot of people here might expect.

whartung• 1 year ago

What’s funny is when I started on SCO Unix ages ago, the default break key was DEL.

It quickly morphed into ^C, but the first few months were interesting.

Coming from the VAX, it was ^T.

kule2• 1 year ago

“Except the Terminal”…

Of course in the Mac you have the same shortcut in every app because you use cmd+c/v

It really bugged me that by default you use ctrl+shift+c/v on Linux but only in the terminal.

Found a lovely feature in kitty term that does the right thing for ctrl+c depending on if you have text selection or not. Works great for me.

hbnjgf3• 1 year ago

Unless you are not using X, selected text us also automatically available for copy using the middle mouse button

sureglymop2• 1 year ago

Actually, on macOS you have the same shortcuts as gnu readline in any text editing field.

You have these same shortcuts in bash, zsh, the python repl, html form fields, etc. And anything that doesn't use gnu readline can be wrapped in rlwrap.

Note that copying and pasting is an exception. Otherwise, navigating words with shortcuts seems to fairly universally use these shortcuts.

meindnoch• 1 year ago

What do you mean? Ctrl+C is SIGINT. Copy is Cmd+C.

fc417fc8024• 1 year ago

What's cmd? I've only got ctrl, alt, super, and hyper over here. /s

I guess I've also that useless "right click menu" keyboard button that's not even worth repurposing for anything due to the placement making it incredibly awkward to use. I'd be curious to know if anyone here actually uses the ctrl or alt keys that are located on the right.

muixoozie• 1 year ago

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.

Didn't know that. I learned the other day that one can paste a password into the URL bar and drag it to a password field on the website that's annoyingly blocking paste (on Firefox at least). Probably a bad idea for security reasons (telemetry?). Just found it surprising. Also noticed many crappy sites that block paste will forget to block Ctrl + insert or Ctrl + Shift + v. I usually don't have this problem because the plugin of my password manager usually works..

diggan2• 1 year ago

Didn't know that. I learned the other day that one can paste a password into the URL bar and drag it to a password field on the website that's annoyingly blocking paste (on Firefox at least). Probably a bad idea for security reasons (telemetry?).

You could probably drag it directly from the password manager to the password field, instead of using the URL bar as an intermediate (which indeed is a bad idea as whatever you enter there usually gets sent somewhere).

enricozb• 1 year ago

Since I do not really use Ctrl-X on the terminal to cut text, I have changed my terminal configs to have Ctrl-X be sigint, and Ctrl-C to be copy. Makes for a nicer experience, also X looks more like a "kill" :)

adastra22• 1 year ago

That makes way more sense.

mixmastamyk9• 1 year ago

Nice, but eons of muscle memory to retrain. :-/

physicles2• 1 year ago

Wow, in 7 years of daily Linux use, I somehow never thought of doing this. Thank you.

~/.bashrc:

stty intr ^x

~/.inputrc (at the end):

"\C-v": "" # Unbind Ctrl-V

~/.config/terminator/config (in case anyone happens to be using terminator):

[keybindings]

  copy = <Control>C

  paste = <Control>V

dotancohen2• 1 year ago

I used to do similar bindings, but one mistype of muscle memory on somebody else's box, or in an SSH session, will teach you not to do that.

Do you want to be productive on your own snowflake system, or employable?

kevin_thibedeau• 1 year ago

IBM didn't invent this scheme. Apple Lisa had Cmd+X,C,V. Early Mac apps switched to K,C,V but obviously they switched back at some point.

teddyh• 1 year ago

IBM didn't invent this scheme.

Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V isn’t even part of the IBM CUA specification. CUA places the Cut command at Shift-Del, Copy on Ctrl-Insert, and Paste on Shift-Insert.

scelerat• 1 year ago

cmd-K for Cut? I don't ever remember that on the Mac.

I remember the lower left row on the US keyboard was always the first four operations from the nearly-ubiquitous Edit menu since day one.

    Z - Undo 
    X - Cut
    C - Copy
    V - Paste

Certainly not the flagship apps from Apple. Can you remember an app that did this specifically? I seem to remember even early apps from Microsoft were fairly respectful of the early Mac HIG

Early apps frequently also had "Clear" in the Edit menu, which was like Cut except the cleared item didn't go into the system Clipboard

jonhohle• 1 year ago

This has always been one of my favorite aspects of macOS (né OS X). GUI app shortcuts and Terminal control sequences are mutually exclusive where it matters and shared where it’s convenient. I find it very natural to navigate text in any app. I find it surprising that no Linux window manager has taken this approach.

BiteCode_dev• 1 year ago

Most terminal now accept ctrl + shit C/V as an alternative on linux.

rz2k• 1 year ago

It started with “System Software” or “Mac OS” (as opposed to “macOS”), since it was an advantage of using terminal software like ZTerm on the pre-OS X operating system. You could select and copy text without unintentionally sending a break.

cxr2• 1 year ago

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

What developer doesn't have these shortcuts memorized? It sounds like you're living in some bizarro world.

skydhash5• 1 year ago

I know devs that still right click for copy and paste.

MangoToupe3• 1 year ago

Oh so IBM is to blame for the worst keybindings imaginable

layer89• 1 year ago

The CUA bindings for Cut, Copy, Paste are actually Shift+Delete, Control+Insert, Shift+Insert.

Microsoft adopted the X/C/V shortcuts from the Macintosh for Windows 3.0 (replacing Command by Control; Alt was already used for invoking menus and the like), in addition to the existing CUA shortcuts (which are still supported and used today).

slashdave• 1 year ago

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V

You mean CMD+C and CMD+V, right?

smokel• 1 year ago

There 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• 1 year ago

Yeo. I map capslock to Esc and use vi bindings.

spauldo7• 1 year ago

It 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.

int_19h10• 1 year ago

It takes way more than a few hours to get used to a new setup like that when you're already very proficient in something else (like using arrow keys).

As for Caps Lock, some of us have good reasons to have it mapped to something else that needs to be done frequently, e.g. switching keyboard layouts.

culebron214• 1 year ago

Because on Ubuntu, they're Ctrl+SHIFT+C/V/X. I've seen Ctrl+C/V not work, and assumed that Bash didn't implement it at all. I've learned the right way casually about 7 years into using Ubuntu.

tzot• 1 year ago

Ctrl-Shift-C/V/X are not implemented in bash; it's the terminal emulator program that handles these. So the default terminal emulator of Ubuntu (gnome-terminal I assume, but ICBW) knows about a “system” clipboard and copies stuff to it and on paste feeds bash with the copied data. If you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 (and F2, F3, depends on your distribution's defaults) you can login and in your login shell, which I understand is bash, Ctrl-Shift-C/V/X have no difference to shiftless Ctrl-C/V/X.

financypants• 1 year ago

i use ctrl + <key> quite often but didn't know about ctrl + backspace! Also, I think mac's cmd + shift + left arrow or right arrow work so well.

neoden• 1 year ago

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

muziq• 1 year ago

Cascadia Code ? https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code

moefh• 1 year ago

That's not it, the lower case 'a' is very different.

CactusRocket2• 1 year ago

Could it be Consolas? It would make sense I believe it's the default monospace font on recent Windows.

wlkr• 1 year ago

I think it's Maple Mono.

https://font.subf.dev/en/

https://github.com/subframe7536/maple-font

lhecker2• 1 year ago

It's indeed Maple Mono. I love that font!

felineflock2• 1 year ago

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.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

Does the exclamation point work in vi, like vim? So the way to exit is to do:

:!killall vi

Of course.

For a cli text editor, ed would qualify, right?

diggan2• 1 year ago

For a cli text editor, ed would qualify, right?

It'd still say ed is more of a TUI than CLI, albeit kind of old-school since it doesn't redraw the screen, just continuously show output and let you enter commands. Maybe "REPL" comes closer, because it's not interactive in the typical TUI way.

rbanffy2• 1 year ago

MS-DOS had edlin, which was their own take on ed. They never made a firm commitment, however, to make edlin the standard editor.

roryirvine• 1 year ago

for maximum excitement, try that killall method on a SysV unix...

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

In Usenet posts - about 15 years before Google - people used to add a pithy humorous sentence at the bottom called "tagline"

We always called them "signatures." They were even stored in a file named .sig.

angled• 1 year ago

^H^H^H^Hsignature

felineflock2• 1 year ago

The tagline was below or at the end of the signature.

They were stored separately in a list and there was software that would pick one of them randomly to add to the signature when posting.

invaliduser• 1 year ago

taglines where witty one-liners posted at the end of messages, after the signature, as a way to add a bit of humor or personality.

I think we also used them in fidonet echomail, but I don't remember for sure.

pxc• 1 year ago

I came here to pick the first of those nits, too. A concrete example that sums it up: sed is a command-line text editor; nano is a TUI text editor.

sjmulder• 1 year ago

Btw, CLI editors can be interactive too: consider ed ("the standard text editor") and DOS' edlin.

snozolli2• 1 year ago

TUI (text user interface)

I find it interesting that everyone is using TUI when I've always seen CUI (Character User Interface). I come from a DOS and Windows background, and it seems like TUI comes from the *nix world.

And Notepad was not the only option for Windows devs.

Dr Dobbs and other tech magazines used to have ads for a variety of editors. And linkers, which were the bane of 80s programmers' lives. There was a whole era of programmer-oriented software that seems to have been largely forgotten.

layer89• 1 year ago

My understanding is that CUI includes both TUI and CLI, and refers to the interface of a text-mode screen (as opposed to a graphical screen — a GUI), where you can use both CLI commands and TUI programs.

So, technically, if you’re using a TUI in a graphical terminal window within a GUI, you’re strictly speaking not in a CUI, but are emulating a CUI within a GUI. And the CLIs and TUIs are running within that CUI.

holowoodman• 1 year ago

you forgot EDLIN

esafak• 1 year ago

'coz it's better forgotten! Who could guess it was made in two weeks in 1980? Anyone who fired it up!

abhgh• 1 year ago

I noticed the conflation of terms too but it seems to arise out of the original Microsoft announcement!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-...

onetom4• 1 year ago

somethings never change...

my biggest problem with azure was also the fact that they couldn't stick to industry-standard terminology, but they has to invent their own. it made azure docs tremendously confusing.

JdeBP5• 1 year ago

Interestingly enough, the weird re-boosting to get more views thing that Hacker News sometimes does is making it seem like I said all of that 5 hours ago.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44310682

Instead of 2 days ago when I actually wrote it. (-:

marttt3• 1 year ago

I'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).

Jenk3• 1 year ago

`ZZ` to save and quit, `ZQ` to quit without saving. Sorry, I can't help myself.

pjio• 1 year ago

Quitting vim isn't about exiting the program, which can easily be done with :!kill -9 $PPID

EFreethought• 1 year ago

I think sysadmins should install nano on servers for people to make quick edits. All the commands are along the bottom, so there is no learning curve.

Jenk3• 1 year ago

Before vim was vi. Befote vi was ex. (Before ex was ed - the first editor for unix)

Vim has ex built in - `Q` in normal mode to enter Ex mode, 3-5 command lines will show at the bottom and you can Ex away. I don't know of practical uses, I've only done it for the novelty.

Obligatory: To exit Ex mode use `:vi[sual]` - and that's probably where Vi got its name.

actionfromafar• 1 year ago

ed is the standard editor

hk1337• 1 year ago

This new editor is actually a reimplementation of the classic MS-DOS 5 EDIT program from 1991.

I remember editing the AUTOEXEC.BAT in that thing as well as writing my own BAT files and QBASIC.

skywhopper• 1 year ago

You’re missing ‘ed’ (and its predecessor ‘qed’) which is actually a CLI text editor.

WalterBright4• 1 year ago

Don't forget MicroEmacs! I've been using it ever since it floated around usenet in 1985 or so.

needlesslygrim2• 1 year ago

I'm curious, why don't you use GNU Emacs?

onetom4• 1 year ago

which variant? jasspa, openbsd/macos mg, torvalds/uemacs ?

why not https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/ starting via jmacs?

wodenokoto• 1 year ago

I forgot how the punchline is phrased, so apologies for the atrocious delivery, but I like the one about “I do all my coding in VIM, because I don’t know how to exit VIM”

skissane3• 1 year ago

This new editor is actually a reimplementation of the classic MS-DOS 5 EDIT program from 1991

MS-DOS 5 EDIT is actually just a stub which runs QBASIC in editor mode, in which all the BASIC-related features are disabled.

Windows 95 EDIT was different, it actually had BASIC removed from the binary. I don't know if it was a rewrite or if they just deleted (or even #ifdef-ed) out the BASIC parts out of the source code.

QBASIC was basically just a cut-down build of QuickBASIC with some features disabled. The TUI part was provided by the "Character Windows" (aka "Character-Oriented Windows", CW or COW) library, a TUI-mode analog to the Windows 3.x API for DOS TUI apps, it was also used by some other Microsoft products such as Word for DOS. It would be great were Microsoft to open source it (although from what I've heard, significant chunks of this stuff have already been included in various leaks of DOS and Windows source code, but it would be nice to have it publicly available in a completely kosher way)

donatj• 1 year ago

QBASIC was basically just a cut-down build of QuickBASIC with some features disabled

Huh, I've wondered about the difference for the last 30+ years.

pico3032• 1 year ago

The target market for this editor seems infinitesimal. Who on Windows these days groks the terminal on Windows, wants a terminal editor instead of Notepad++ or VSCode, and finds Neovim overwhelming? And certainly no one on Ubuntu is looking for this.

That said, give me QuickBasic back in the terminal on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and now you’ve got my attention…

rozab• 1 year ago

The term CLI has just come to mean "in a terminal" for a certain subculture, e.g. https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps

People do know the technical difference, it's just a shorthand

da_chicken3• 1 year ago

I understand the categorization you want to draw, but I don't think convention and usage are going to back you up well enough to solidify it.

Sometimes people use CLI to mean something you're literally doing at the shell prompt, and sometimes people use CLI to mean anything that isn't a GUI. And the Venn diagram of those meanings has significant overlap when both of those meanings are contextually valid and the end result of the meaning is functionally identical.

If I say, "instead of Firefox I'm using lynx, a CLI web browser," it's not really so ambiguous what I mean that you're confused. You can do backflips and dodge context to arrive at being confusing, but you really have to cross into disingenuous reading to get there.

The fact that you CAN draw a difference does not actually mean that the author needs to in order to communicate effectively.

JadeNB• 1 year ago

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.

Sounds like ed, or edlin for the DOS oldies, to me.

posix86• 1 year ago

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.

drdunce• 1 year ago

Although 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.

tialaramex3• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

What 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

3836293648• 1 year ago

Just don't use the C-c clipboard anywhere?

If you want consistency, just use the other one?

jll29• 1 year ago

Works like a breeze.

Make sure to add

  alias edit=msedit

to your ~/.profile for full "DOS compatibility".

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

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

Y_Y2• 1 year ago

It is certainly nothing like an eMac.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac

jmmv• 1 year ago

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.

czarit• 1 year ago

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

easton• 1 year ago

Guessing 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.

JdeBP5• 1 year ago

Go and read 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• 1 year ago

The author answers it themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961

I agree with pretty much all of their reasoning.

orsenthil• 1 year ago

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.

userbinator• 1 year ago

I guess it's someone who worked at Microsoft in the late 80s/early 90s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor

augusto-moura2• 1 year ago

I 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-... and it seems that all 32bit windows versions had edit. I was probably using Windows XP 32 the last time I remember using edit

suby• 1 year ago

I remember the author posting on a HN thread a month ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961

jacooper• 1 year ago

Micro is much more intuitive than nano, but I think Edit is better. Just need it to start rolling out to production distros.

mixmastamyk9• 1 year ago

I 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.

lbruder• 1 year ago

have you tried mcedit? It's the editor mc (Midnight Commander, a Norton Commander clone) brings along, looks and feels like the old DOS editor, but has more features

spauldo7• 1 year ago

It has the "feel" of a DOS program. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just that it feels a bit alien on UNIX.

The first UNIX system I learned on had pico, the editor nano was modeled after. I personally found it intuitive enough, but too simple in the long run. Editors like nano or DOS EDIT are great for light use, but you reach their limitations pretty fast if you do a lot of serious editing.

quantadev2• 1 year ago

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.

rand17• 1 year ago

I simply bought a new laptop.

quantadev2• 1 year ago

Ah, what we call the "Nuclear Option for Vim Exiting". Only if all else fails.

k3vinw2• 1 year ago

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

lhecker2• 1 year ago

The 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).

k3vinw2• 1 year ago

That’s excellent. Thanks for sharing and best wishes to the team’s success and popularity of the new editor!

mixmastamyk9• 1 year ago

The keyboard shortcuts are from Windows, adapted from the original MacOS. IBM CUA was also a factor.

simonw2• 1 year ago

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

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-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-...

kinduff• 1 year ago

I built it for macOS natively and it works like a charm!

rfl890• 1 year ago

Just wondering, why did you make an entire container image instead of trying to compile it from source first?

VikingCoder• 1 year ago

Because 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.

simonw2• 1 year ago

Mainly 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.

None4U• 1 year ago

For Apple's own `container`[1], just remove the `--platform linux/arm64` part, like this:

  container run -it --rm -v "$(pwd):/workspace" ghcr.io/simonw/alpine-edit

I did have to resize my terminal for this to work, but that could be a terminal emulator issue.

[1] https://github.com/apple/container

commandersaki2• 1 year ago

This was harder to quit than vim. ctrl-f didn't work and there's no alt on my keyboard; hard pass.

culebron214• 1 year ago

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".

wonger_• 1 year ago

I 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?

culebron214• 1 year ago

I 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_19h10• 1 year ago

Far Manager isn't just for Windows anymore:

https://github.com/elfmz/far2l

Debian even has it in the official repos. It's also on Homebrew.

russellbeattie• 1 year ago

A 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_19h10• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

I 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.

T3OU-736• 1 year ago

Another text editor from the makers of Edlin. (Sorry, could not help myself!)

mixmastamyk9• 1 year ago

copy con for the win!

ChicagoDave• 1 year ago

Or just use nano like most VIM haters.

__MatrixMan__2• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

I 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.

skissane3• 1 year ago

Sun 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_19h10• 1 year ago

I 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_...

It was certainly convenient for people learning the ropes. Too bad it died out when chiclet keyboards became the norm.

nop17• 1 year ago

It state support macos but in release section there is no macos package.

AbuAssar• 1 year ago

there is also Midnight Commander Editor (mcedit), which has syntax highlighting, macros, code snippets and automatic indentation!

Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu

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