Microsoft Edit - Hacker News

Posted by ethanpil 6/25/2025

486 points | 322 comments

orsenthil 6/25/2025|

So much excitement that this got posted 3 times in a week

1. By the author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961 2. Ubuntu Publication - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44306892

And this post.

johannes1234321 6/25/2025|

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

pxc 6/25/2025||

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/

seabrookmx 6/25/2025||

IMO it should not.

`edit` doesn't even support syntax highlighting (atleast, out of the box when I tried it).

_flux 6/25/2025|||

It might in the future, though, as the main developer has opened an issue about it: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/18

The trick is doing it while keeping the binary size small, so tree sitter is not an option.

ComputerGuru 6/25/2025|||

Vim (and so many other editors, too) supported syntax highlighting for decades before TreeSitter even existed. Let’s not act as if this is a novel challenge.

kasajian 6/26/2025|||

why would the binary size be big to support this? Scintilla has been doing syntax color for decades -- it's pretty small.

Litruv 6/25/2025|||

I think you missed the point of edit.

bapak 6/25/2025|||

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.

kristopolous 6/25/2025|||

I met someone recently that still uses WordStar. Yes I'm serious. He runs it in QEMU on FreeDOS. He's a writer for a living.

4k93n2 6/25/2025|||

George R.R. Martin still uses Wordstar as well!

legends2k 6/25/2025|||

Sure, there are always exceptions but they're only that, exceptions.

shakna 6/25/2025|||

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 6/25/2025|||

Is that why the series ground to a halt

shakna 6/26/2025||

> “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.

antonvs 6/29/2025||

> 12 years late

Seems like people have cut him a lot of slack already. Of course he doesn’t really owe anything to anybody, but at some point he and everyone else has to face the reality - which is that if that book is ever published, it’ll be posthumously, finished by a ghostwriter.

red_admiral 6/25/2025||||

Rachel Kroll once posted that she writes her posts in nano, with the distraction of syntax highlighting turned off: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/09/24/editor/

I can't find the link but I think at some point she compiled her own nano with some "helpful" feature patched out again.

kasajian 6/26/2025||||

I think you're assuming people who are thinking of going beyond the original "point" of edit missed that point. We didn't. We're looking new directions it can go.

seabrookmx 6/25/2025|||

I think you missed the question I was answering in my comment.

JdeBP 6/25/2025||

There's an underlying assumption about "target audience for this editor" that you both share, that others, I suspect quite a few others, do not.

For starters, there's your assumption that there is "syntax" to be highlighted. Not every text file is something written in a computer programming language.

seabrookmx 6/25/2025|||

You're right, I do assume most (90+%? of) people that are looking for a terminal editor are likely developers.

In fact I'd put money on it, but sadly do not have any evidence to back it up.

If you have evidence to the contrary I'd be intrigued!

pxc 6/26/2025||

You might not be wrong about percentages, but there are famously some Emacs users who for into it for Org mode or academic writing, including even some who learned to program long to better customize their Emacs setup and eventually became contributors.

But these are amateur geeks or geeks in the making who probably don't mind having the capability of syntax highlighting built in, even if for some purposes they want it turned off.

prmoustache 6/25/2025|||

Last time I checked, micro should have been called macro based on the binary file size.

pxc 6/25/2025|||

Isn't the relatively large binary just because it's written in Golang? Go executables each ship their own copy of the Go runtime. That alone accounts for a big chunk of small programs like this.

Nano also links against ncurses, which is about as big as the compressed tarball for micro. I'm looking at the dependency closures of each right now in nix-tree[1], and micro's closure's total size is 15.04 MiB while nano's is 12.78 MiB-- not really "orders of magnitude" (as a sibling commenter suggests) when you look at it like that.

Admittedly, nano's dependencies (`file` and `ncurses`, on my system) are likely to ship as part of the "base system" of any Linux distro anyway; the real size it adds to any distro is negligible. But there's no indication to me that micro is meaningfully "bloated", as the meme goes; it seems like what is required to run it is reasonable and comparable to other tools that serve the same purpose.

1: See: https://github.com/utdemir/nix-tree ; Try `nix run nixpkgs#nix-tree -- $(nix build --no-link --json nixpkgs#nano | jq -r .[0].outputs.out)`

prmoustache 6/25/2025|||

The reason may help understand why but it is not really interesting from the point of view of the user or those packaging it with their OS.

3836293648 6/25/2025||||

Well, it is orders of magnitude larger than nano, so...

sime2009 6/25/2025|||

Seriously? We're going to complain about a couple megs in a text editor in the year 2025?

mixmastamyk 6/25/2025|||

Yes, couldn’t use on my router because of its size. No reason for a TUI to be so big. Advanced features outside of syntax highlighting not useful. Should have a light version.

I installed nano with CUA keybindings instead.

prmoustache 6/25/2025|||

Like my mother say. Small stream makes huge rivers.

Not caring about a couple of megs here and there is what makes some modern systems so bloated.

smartmic 6/25/2025|||

There is also dte[1]. It hits exactly the same notch and offers an extremely lean editor with Unicode support, CUA key bindings and much more. It has replaced nano as my terminal editor.

[1]: https://craigbarnes.gitlab.io/dte/

whou 6/25/2025|||

I'd recommend everyone to take a look and read some of dte's source code. It's a great example of beautifully written modern C code.

sneak 6/25/2025|||

Why are you opposed to learning vi which is already installed everywhere?

4ggr0 6/25/2025|||

as someone who uses CLI text editors frequently, but not often enough to build the muscle memory which remembers VI shortcuts, i really appreciate simple text editors.

i know that i can press like 3-4 arbitrary buttons to mark a block to move it to a different place - how about i just mark it with my cursor and CTRL-X CTRL-V, like every freaking other program out there.

i appreciate that i got VI on freshly installed or secured servers, but for things i use daily, i just want it to be KISS. already counting on people answering 'but vim is easy and simple'. opinions differ i guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU

IshKebab 6/25/2025||||

Because vi has all the usability of a keyboard made out of hedgehogs.

s1mplicissimus 6/25/2025|||

I wouldn't consider vi usability to be overall bad. Sure, affordance ("is it easy grasp which moves i can make without affording much cognitive effort?") is terrible.

Setting up a decent environment is also a huge pain to get started with, but nowadays you can just hop into a prewarmed pool with premade setups like Normalvim or LunarVim.

But usability is not just "is it easy to learn", it's also "once i know it, how hard is it to use"

Once the moves are ingrained in your (muscle-)memory it becomes so incredibly efficient. di{, dat, yaf etc. are just the low hanging fruit, once you start with regex, macros and plugins the fun really begins.

sneak 6/25/2025|||

vi isn’t usable. it sucks. but the facts are it’s installed everywhere and you can learn how to use it in 10-15 minutes. easier to patch your ignorance of basic vi than it is to install software on every machine you’ll ever edit on.

pxc 6/25/2025||||

I like vim a lot, and I use vim-style bindings wherever I can.

But before I learned to ride a bike, I used training wheels, and before I learned enough vim to enjoy using vim, I leaned on nano.

When someone is first learning to explore GNU/Linux, or even to dig into the Unix guts of macOS, they're learning a whole new world, not just a new text editor. For some people, strategic bridges to what they know (like CUA or Windows-like shortcuts) can make this process more fun and less fatiguing. Sometimes that difference is decisive in keeping someone motivated to learn and explore more.

Anyway, I think vim is worth learning (and maybe some of the quirks of old-school vi, if you expect to work on old or strange systems). It's not a matter of if I recommend that someone learn vim, but when. And until it's time for them to explore an editor deeply, micro seems like a great fit for most people.

I also want to say: as enthusiasts of Unix-like operating systems, or as professionals who appreciate some of their enduring strengths, should we really embrace a "because it's there" doctrine? Isn't that same kind of thinking responsible for huge, frustrating piles of mediocrity that we work with every day and resent?

ss someone who loves an ecosystem built first by volunteers as "just a hobby, nothing big and serious", I will it's sad, if not hypocritical, to dismiss software projects just because they aren't already dominant players. Most software I love was once marginal, something its users went to lengths to install on the systems they used because they enjoyed it more than the defaults. We should, to the extent practical, try to leave a little room for that in the way we approach computing— even as we get older and grumpier.

smartmic 6/25/2025||||

I learned vi a long time ago and use it when no other editor is at hand. In fact, I am using several editors simultaneously, depending on the task at hand and what is availabe. I stumbled over dte because I like to try out new things. And because dte hits many sweet spots for me, I installed it on machines where I often need a terminal editor. Binding myself to only one tool just because I learned to use it at some point in time is not my philosophy. Thankfully, the open source world offers so many alternatives and innovations, so that there is something for almost all tastes and habits. It comes with no costs besides building muscle memory to switch as needed and wanted.

mixmastamyk 6/25/2025||||

Learning CUA once is more realistic/convenient for most people.

JdeBP 6/25/2025|||

You realize that you're asking this in a discussion of a tool that is intended to be installed out of the box on Microsoft Windows, where vi is not installed out of the box, right? Your "everywhere" doesn't include the primary use case for what is being headlined here.

EasyMark 6/26/2025|||

Micro is a great editor to replace stuff like nano. I think it would be a bad replacement for edit though, edit is very barebones, and micro is very "upgradeable" through lua. It also handles large files quite well also

mattbee 6/25/2025||

And you can get it on Windows with just "winget install zyedidia.micro". Reminds me of 8 & 16-bit editors of a similar era.

pulkitsh1234 6/25/2025||

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 6/25/2025||

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 6/25/2025||

Telling people to use nano would of course have been next to impossible. Much easier to rewrite a DOS-era editor in Rust, naturally.

red_admiral 6/25/2025|||

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.

oersted 6/25/2025||||

micro would have been an even better choice, the UX is impressively close to something like Sublime Text for a TUI, and very comfortable for those not used to modal editors.

aembleton 6/25/2025|||

This is the first time I've heard of micro. More info here: https://micro-editor.github.io/

subjectsigma 6/25/2025||||

I like micro and use it occasionally. I like this even more. I booted up the editor and instantly thought “it would be nice if there was a clickable buffer list right about…” and then realized my mouse was hovering over it. My next instant thought was that micro should have implemented this feature a long time ago

mixmastamyk 6/25/2025|||

It doesn’t have a menu for windows devs, and is supposed to be small and light. Two strikes against.

dark-star 6/25/2025||||

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 6/25/2025||

> does nano support mouse usage?

Yes, but you have to put `set mouse` into your nanorc.

Kwpolska 6/25/2025||||

> rewrite

This is not a rewrite. Maybe it’s slightly inspired by the old thing, especially with having GUI-style clickable menus (something not seen often in terminal editors), but it’s much more modern.

Gormo 6/25/2025|||

It does seem "modern" in the sense that it is incredibly limited in functionality (EDIT.COM from DOS is much more full-featured) and deviates from well-established UI conventions.

CUA-style menubars aren't that uncommon in textmode editors. Midnight Commander's editor has traditional menubars with much more extensive functionality, as does jedsoft.org's Jed editor. Both of these also support mouse input on the TTY console via GPM, not just within a graphical terminal.

dark-star 6/25/2025|||

I still see it as rewrite even if you only use the original as inspiration. But that's just semantics

dmd 6/25/2025|||

If they hadn’t called it “edit” you wouldn’t have thought of it as a rewrite.

TiredOfLife 6/25/2025|||

It's no semantics. It's just a lie

JdeBP 6/25/2025||||

The developer actually explained, on Hacker News just over a month ago, some of the engineering choices that ruled out nano.

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

nmeofthestate 6/25/2025||||

nano's great but the shortcuts are a bit oddball, from the perspective of a Windows guy.

zamalek 6/25/2025|||

A text editor is an obvious target for copilot integration.

sublimefire 6/25/2025||

Each group needs to do something and they come up with the ideas. Sometimes it is driven by various leaders, e.g. “use copilot”. Sometimes it is an idea from some hackerdayz event which gets expanded. Sometimes this is driven in research units where you have a bunch of technical people twiddling their thumbs. Sometimes this is an idea that goes through deep analysis and multiple semesters before it gets funding.

Look at the amount of contributors here. This project was probably some strategic investment. It did not come to existence overnight.

scoopr 6/25/2025||

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.

JdeBP 6/25/2025||

You should raise that as an issue. If things like that get in early enough, they get heard.

And it wasn't just similar. It was literally the same. EDIT.COM simply started QBASIC up with a special flag. One could just run QBASIC with the flag. As I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44037509 , I actually did, just for kicks.

mysterydip 6/25/2025|||

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

unsupp0rted 6/25/2025||

edit was a godsend after the `copy con` days

naikrovek 6/25/2025||

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!?”

nhatcher 6/25/2025||

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 6/26/2025|

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

masfoobar 6/25/2025||

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...

martinald 6/25/2025||

I strongly suspect in time Microsoft will move to Linux, at least with things like Windows Server and embedded Windows. Then a gradual change for Windows desktop, or a sort of Windows Legacy vs Windows "Linux Workstation" desktop options. Linux kernel + some sort of 'super' WINE and a fallback tightly integrated Windows classic on a VM for certain programs.

Only problem is that the NT kernel in many ways is much better than the Linux kernel design wise (for example, the NT kernel can handle a total GPU driver crash and restore itself, which I think Linux would really struggle with - same with a lot of other drivers).

But Windows is increasingly a liability not an asset for Microsoft, especially in the server space. Their main revenue stream is Azure & Office 365 which is growing at double digits still, with Windows license growth flat.

At a minimum I'd expect a Linux based version of Windows Server and some sort of Workstation version of Windows, based on Linux.

naikrovek 6/25/2025|||

> I strongly suspect in time Microsoft will move to Linux, at least with things like Windows Server and embedded Windows.

You may not understand how important Microsoft considers backwards compatibility. Switching to a Linux kernel would eliminate all of that, and that is simply not an option for Microsoft.

The Linux kernel is missing a lot of esoteric things that the NT kernel has and that people use a lot, as well.

Windows as we use the word today (any variant) will not ever switch to a Linux kernel.

I do hope one day that Microsoft put a proper GUI on Linux though, no X, no Wayland, but something smarter and better than those. Probably also not likely to happen but I’d love to see it if they could do it well.

boomlinde 6/26/2025|||

I think most userspace applications won't interact directly with the NT kernel, hence a project like Wine is at all viable (and sometimes provides better compatibility with older Windows applications than Windows).

trelane 6/25/2025|||

> I do hope one day that Microsoft put a proper GUI on Linux though, no X, no Wayland, but something smarter and better than those.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Now that I say that, though, that does sound like a Microsoft kind of move. They do love other platforms "to death."

naikrovek 6/26/2025||

I hate that XKCD so much.

People use it as if to say that there should never be anything new.

gunsle 6/25/2025|||

[flagged]

LionEgo 6/25/2025|||

The reason why WSL is a thing is because developers in corps needed a way to run Linux. IT support and techs doesn't know anything about Linux typically and don't want to deal with supporting it. WSL fixes this problem.

Most developers don't want to use Linux at all. Many developers don't even really know how to user a terminal and rely on GUI tools.

masfoobar 6/25/2025|||

> Most developers don't want to use Linux at all. Many developers don't even really know how to user a terminal and rely on GUI tools.

First of all, I disagree with this comment.

However, lets assume you are right.. that the average "Windows Developer" has little to zero skills in GNU/Linux.

If that is the case, it proves my point EVEN MORE that Micrsofot missed out creating a Microsoft Linux Distro... designed to have Powershell, Visual Studio Code, Edit, and potentially Edge, SQL Server, etc.

It would still be Linux but keeping to what they know in Windows -- and would have given Microsoft more power in the linux world.

LionEgo 6/25/2025||

> First of all, I disagree with this comment.

You can disagree all you want. It is simply the truth. I've contracted in the UK and Europe. Most devs don't even know you can tab complete most commands in modern shells (IIRC cmd.exe supports this). This is both Microsoft Shops and shops that use opensource stacks e.g. LAMP and similar.

I was in a large company in the NW and I knew two developers in a team of 30 that knew basic bash and vim.

There is a reason why "how I exit from vim" is a meme. Most people have no idea how to do it.

> If that is the case, it proves my point EVEN MORE that Micrsofot missed out creating a Microsoft Linux Distro... designed to have Powershell, Visual Studio Code, Edit, and potentially Edge, SQL Server, etc.

Respectfully you seem to have never worked with the people I describe. You listed PowerShell as if they would use it. A former colleague of mine was quizzed why he would use PowerShell to write a script that would run on a Windows Server. They had expected him to write a C# program.

masfoobar 6/26/2025||

> I was in a large company in the NW and I knew two developers in a team of 30 that knew basic bash and vim.

I have worked for various companies as well, UK, Netherlands, etc. Yes, from my experience, working for jobs in a Windows environment (Windows development) will have less knowledge of bash or linux in general if they simply are not using it. These are developers using Windows, SQL Server, .NET, and other Microsoft-focused products.

I would agree that Windows developers have less skills with a shell, even CMD.. or much less Powershell. However, if we are going to FOCUS on this userbase, they are likely to be accepting to using a WSL Linux distro created by Microsoft bundled with powershell, .net, etc.. than to use Ubuntu with bash, vim/nano or variants.

Also, I have worked for Companies that focused on LAMP development and their linux skills were decent to pro. The only time someone would struggle is likely because their are junior level.. and coming from a Windows background.

> Respectfully you seem to have never worked with the people I describe. You listed PowerShell as if they would use it. A former colleague of mine was quizzed why he would use PowerShell to write a script that would run on a Windows Server. They had expected him to write a C# program.

Powershell... C#... both of which are Microsoft. Powershell is .NET under the hood. Doesn't change my comment.

8-prime 6/25/2025||||

> Most developers don't want to use Linux at all. I don't know if this is necessarily true. Many of the develops I know prefer GUI applications to cli tooling, which I can get behind. That has nothing to do with Linux vs Windows though. But my struggles with Windows are plentiful and the same goes for all my colleagues. I have a hard time believing that we are the outliers and not the rule.

philistine 6/25/2025|||

> Most developers don't want to use Linux at all.

(looks at the install numbers for Linux vs Windows in the server space) I'm not so sure.

LionEgo 6/25/2025|||

We are the outliers. My co-workers hasn't even removed the awful Windows weather app and search bar from the taskbar.

lpcvoid 6/25/2025||||

Sorry for the snarky comment, but then those devs are simply bad. Windows is legacy, the future is in open source.

LionEgo 6/25/2025||

> Sorry for the snarky comment, but then those devs are simply bad

Yes. That is the majority of developers. I had to explain to a dev today (nice enough guy) that he has to actually run the tests.

> Windows is legacy, the future is in open source.

You can claim the future is opensource but the industry has moved towards SAAS, PAAS, IAAS which is even more lock in than using a proprietary OS such as Windows.

So while you might have an opensource OS, many of the programs you use will be proprietary in the worst way possible.

dang 6/26/2025||

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

paxcoder 6/26/2025||

[dead]

trelane 6/25/2025|||

> Many developers don't even really know how to user a terminal and rely on GUI tools.

Fortunately, Linux users can also avail themselves of a graphical interface as well.

LionEgo 6/25/2025||

Your snark at my comments is completely unwarranted.

I really shouldn't have to explain what follows. But I will.

Installing any dev tooling that is third party is done on the command line. Look up the instructions for installing Node LTS on Debian, or .NET, or Golang. You need to use the command line. Even on easier to use Distros they have the same procedure. Depending on the tooling you may need to set additional environment variables which are normally done in your .bashrc or similar.

What normally happens is people blindly copy and paste things into the terminal and don't read the documentation. This has been a problem on Linux since before Ubuntu was released. This isn't just limited to newbies either.

The state of GUIs BTW isn't great. Many of them look nice, and work reasonably well most of the time, *until they don't* e.g. If I double click a deb to install it, sometimes it will install. Other times it won't. So I don't even bother anymore and just use dpkg/apt. BTW it isn't any better with other distros. So I have to drop to the command line to fix the issue anyway.

So at some point you will need to learn bash, learn to read the man pages, and manually edit configuration file. It is unavoidable on Linux.

repler 6/25/2025|||

> 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 6/25/2025|||

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 6/25/2025|||

That wasn't Linux. Unix != Linux.

subjectsigma 6/25/2025|||

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.

Arnavion 6/25/2025|||

>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.

You're confusing Microsoft's first-party Linux distro Azure Linux (nee CBL-Mariner) that is intended as a regular MS-supported OS for containers, VMs, servers, etc, with various Windows-like skins for Linux DEs that people have made for years.

dfedbeef 6/25/2025|||

You think Microsoft maintains an entire secret distro just for Windows people to feel 'at home'.

masfoobar 6/25/2025||

> You think Microsoft maintains an entire secret distro just for Windows people to feel 'at home'.

Sorry I dont understand the point you are making.

I did not suggest they had a "secret distro" I am suggesting they could have claimed a share of dominance in the Linux Distro as the default WSL distro.

delfinom 6/25/2025||

>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.

Yes, but how do they make money by doing this.

Unlike the socialist hiveminds that end up being behind the distros. Microsoft has salaries and bills to pay.

As far as I've always seen, everyone loves to leech on Microsoft's free stuff but nobody wants to pay for a product.

masfoobar 6/25/2025||

I do not claim to be a business expert but I dont think their success comes from just their Windows Operating System. Well, I would say the success for Windows is not about the profit but the control of users. If the majority are on Windows, they are unlikly to change habit to what they are familar with.

Besdies, for new PC/Laptops come bundled with Windows, Microsoft has made an agreement made with various retailers to come with Windows (Home edition) preinstalled. So in some ways, Windows is free for the User unless they pay for Professional edition, or whatever is offered today.

Of course, the average user will create a microsoft account to complete the install. :-)

Besides the Windows OS -- it is really the Services they provide.. Azure, Office365, SQL Server, PowerBI, etc. I would say THIS is where a lot of the money comes from... business willing to pay for them!

I work for Companies that are willing to PAY for these things - all for "Support"

If something goes wrong.. raise it with Microsoft. Even if I know what the problem is, it is all about the ticketing system. Throw it to Microsoft and carry on.

Despite the above, Microsoft also have "Free" software. They have started to Open Source many of their software.. allowing Linux support as well as Windows. Visual Studio Code, SQL Server, Powershell, etc.

It comes back to my point. When they presented WSL - they could have provided a "MS Linux" Distro, all promoted as "ease for Windows users" and if it became a popular distro, would have pushed micrsoft to have more control in userland... which would have alienated most Windows users away from Ubuntu, etc.

Like Windows, it is a method to keeping your userbase to rely on what they know overall.

jksmith 6/25/2025||

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.

dleslie 6/25/2025||

For those curious, here is a modern port of the C++ Turbo Vision that also supports Unicode:

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

san1927 6/25/2025||

lmao is any body still using turbo cpp?

srvmshr 6/25/2025|||

You'll be surprised if I tell you several universities in India have not updated their curriculum in a very long time & Turbo C++ (& its non-standard C++ flavor) is the weapon of choice. The school board in the '00s, which preferred to teach a programming language for CS, used to have it curriculum around this C++ dialect. I have passed my high-school board examinations with this language (It was known to be already outdated in 2004. The smart kids knew the real C++ was programming by Visual Studio 6 ecosystem. But one had to still deal with it to clear the exams.)

Admitted, a few things have changed in last couple of years. MATLAB is being replaced by Python. Teaching 8085 & 8051 is being replaced by RasPi/Arduino. 8086 is taught alongside ARM & RISC, and not touted as SoTA.

I last saw Turbo being used in 2016-17 in a university setting, inside a DosBox (because Windows 7+ have dropped support for such old programs). Insane, but true.

Arnavion 6/25/2025|||

Yeah, I also learned C++ via Turbo C++ in school in India in the early 2000s. Googling for "conio.h" shows Indians still talking about it in blogs and C/C++ forums as of 2024.

ethbr1 6/25/2025||||

> You'll be surprised if I tell you several universities in India have not updated their curriculum in a very long time

I once asked an Indian colleague why Indians use US/UK-nonstandard English like "kindly", "do the needful", and "revert".

He thought about it a minute, then said "Oh, the texts everyone uses to learn English say that proper letters must always begin with 'Kindly,'".

Sokath, his eyes uncovered.

ashoeafoot 6/25/2025||||

embrace. extend. deadend.

zozbot234 6/25/2025|||

Nice. This editor could see a lot of use in such places if it gains developer-oriented features such as LSP, DAP and tree-sitter parsers. As a Rust-written editor, it will probably be quite a bit easier on resources than the usual modern choices which generally involve VSCode or Jetbeans plus language-specific plugins.

nazgulsenpai 6/25/2025||||

Core memory unlocked... When I was ~10-12, I asked my dad (who knew nothing but thought he knew everything about computers) how to make programs for Windows because I couldn't in QBasic. His answer was "with C++!". He came home with a book Learn C++ In 24 Hours that had Turbo C++ on a single 3.5" floppy disk. Naturally, that did not work, but I still had fun failing to compile every program I attempted to write.

dleslie 6/25/2025||||

OpenWatcom is the preferred choice of those still writing DOS applications, but there are those that still use Turbo C++ for the nostalgia.

iforgotpassword 6/25/2025||

Oh, a few years ago I wanted to write a simple program for dos. Since this is a Linux-only household otherwise, I was delighted to see OpenWatcom has a Linux port. I spent a good half hour trying to get a simple first version of the program I wanted to write running, but it always crashed right away. I simplified more and more until I basically arrived at hello world. On a hunch I ran the windows version of OpenWatcom with wine, and lo and behold, the program ran flawlessly! Once I googled that I found a couple of forum threads where people went like "yeah sure the Linux port produces broken binaries" because of course.

It's never the compiler until it's the compiler. Just didn't expect it during some simple fun coding at home. :)

keyle 6/25/2025|||

I wish I was.

TiredOfLife 6/25/2025|||

> This is just a "because I wanted to" project.

It's not. They needed a small TUI editor that was bundled with Windows and worked over ssh.

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

jksmith 6/26/2025||

Well, I don't have the rights to bundle anything with windows, nor would I want to. All you'd need is a thin player to reproduce a TUI screen if done in FPC, and it wouldn't be limited to Windows. All I'm suggesting is we tend to have some recency prejudice in our development, even when it costs more time/money than it should. I'm sure I've done the same over the years.

nathell 6/25/2025|||

array[1..25, 1..80] of Word absolute $B800:0000.

Arrays in TP were laid out in row-major order, and each character was represented by two bytes, one denoting the character itself and the other the attributes (foreground/background color and blinking). So, even better, array[1..25, 1..80] of packed record ch: char; attr: byte end absolute $B800:0000.

Replace $B800 with $B000 for monochrome text display (mode 7), e.g., on the Hercules.

throwaway127482 6/25/2025|||

I am curious about how you made money with it, if you don't mind sharing.

jksmith 6/25/2025||

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 6/25/2025||

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 6/25/2025|||

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.

esafak 6/25/2025||

Kahn is still pretty active: https://philippekahn.com/

velcrovan 6/25/2025||

I skimmed the blog. I detect LLM output, but no person.

natebc 6/25/2025||

I think we're going to have to get used to feeling like this. Makes me sad a little.

rollcat 6/25/2025|||

The broadcast industry continues to move at a slow pace compared to IT, and understandably - it's live TV, you need things to work 24/7/365.

That means there's always an opportunity for the resourceful.

electroly 6/25/2025|||

Every time I see a new modern TUI framework, my disappointment is the same: "Oh. This isn't as good as Turbo Vision."

wenc 6/25/2025|||

Turbo Vision was truly immersive. I used it in Turbo C and also in Paradox 4.5.

So good.

ByteDrifter 6/25/2025||

Funny how something that ran in a tiny box on a 386 could feel more responsive than some modern GUIs. Turbo Vision really nailed the basics.

kgwxd 6/25/2025||

I swear the characters appear on the screen before I press the keys when I'm in a real (not emulated) Linux terminal. I can't feel the lag as I'm typing this comment into a basic textarea, but it's clearly there, because a terminal feels magical.

no_wizard 6/25/2025|||

I always thought Charm was pretty robust as far as TUI tools go[0]

[0]: https://charm.sh/

macjohnmcc 6/25/2025||

I'd love for an interface like that on VSCode that runs in a terminal even remotely.

red_admiral 6/25/2025||

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 6/25/2025|

I think ed is what you’re looking for (possibly with -s).

JdeBP 6/25/2025||

Ironically, given the mention of vi, it is ex that is what red_admiral is looking for. (-:

anyfoo 6/25/2025||

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

tim-- 6/25/2025||

It's for people that want to use the Windows Terminal to edit files. The old `edit` command has been unsupported on Windows since 2006, so there was no Microsoft-provided editor that could be used in the command line since then.

It's impressive to see how fast this editor is. https://github.com/microsoft/edit/pull/408

> By writing SIMD routines specific to newline seeking, we can bump that up [to 125GB/s]

_verandaguy 6/25/2025|||

Is... this a meaningful benchmark?

Who's editing files big enough to benefit from 120GBps throughput in any meaningful way on the regular using an interactive editor rather than just pushing it through a script/tool/throwing it into ETL depending on the size and nature of the data?

magicalhippo 6/25/2025|||

At work we have to modify some 500 MB XML's every now and then, as the source messes them up in non-repeating ways occasionally.

Typically we just hand edit them. Actually been pleasantly surprised at how well VS Code handles it, very snappy.

pprnm 6/25/2025||

I use the CudaText for big files. It is like open source Sublime.

0points 6/25/2025||||

For a text editor, yes, absolutely.

As developers, we rotinely need to work with large data sets, may it be gigabytes of logs, csv data, sql dump or what have you.

Not being able to open and edit those files means you cant do your job.

_verandaguy 6/25/2025|||

I work exclusively outside of the windows ecosystem, so my usual go to would be to pipe this through some filtering tools in the CLI long before I crack them open with an editor.

trelane 6/25/2025||

You could make an argument for emacs, but probably not using emacs as a pure text editor.

Geezus_42 6/25/2025|||

But are you really trying to do that on a Windows Server? I feel like there are better tools for the job.

delfinom 6/25/2025||

"Better tools for the job" isn't always "the tool currently bringing in the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$". So you live with it.

Sure, maybe by switching to linux you can squeeze out an extra CPU core's worth of performance after you fire your entire staff and replace them with Linux experienced developers, and then rewrite everything to work on Linux.

Or, live with it and make money money money money.

trelane 6/25/2025||

> make money money money money.

Subject, of course, to Microsoft allowing you to continue to use their software.

tiagod 6/25/2025||||

I have to scroll through huge files quite frequently, and that's the reason I have Sublime Text installed, as it deals with them very well.

orthoxerox 6/25/2025|||

I have FAR installed for the same reason.

EasyMark 6/26/2025|||

less works pretty well if you don't need to edit the files.

WD-42 6/25/2025||||

Who cares? It’s fun. Programming can be fun.

anyfoo 6/25/2025|||

To turn this around, you can have fun and ask if something is meaningful or not outside the fun at the same time. If it is, great. If it's not, no harm.

_verandaguy 6/25/2025|||

I'm not saying that doing this can't be fun, or even good to learn off of, but when it's touted as a feature or a spec, I do have to ask if it's a legitimate point.

If you build the world's widest bike, that's cool, and I'm happy you had fun doing it, but it's probably not the most useful optimization goal for a bike.

WD-42 6/25/2025|||

Not a great analogy. This editor is really fast. Speed is important, to a point. But having more of it isn't going to hurt anything. It is super fun to write fast code though.

legends2k 6/25/2025|||

I don't think a sentence in a big report page is counted as touting.

anyfoo 6/25/2025||||

Not on the regular, but there are definitely times I load positively gigantic files in emacs for various reasons. In those times, emacs asks me if I want to enable "literal" mode. Don't think I'd do it in EDIT, though.

tim-- 6/25/2025||||

As a specific benchmark, no. But that wasn't the point of linking to the PR. Although the command looks like a basic editor, it is surprisingly featureful.

Fuzzy search, regular expression find & replace.

I wonder how much work is going to continue going into the new command? Will it get syntax highlighting (someone has already forked it and added Python syntax highlighting: https://github.com/gurneesh9/scriptly) and language server support? :)

_verandaguy 6/25/2025||

Right, these are more useful features, IMO, than the ability to rip through 125GB of data every second. I can live without that, but syntax highlighting's a critical feature, and for some languages LSP support is a really big nice-to-have. I think both of those are, in this day and age, really legitimate first-class/built-in features. So are fuzzy searching and PCRE find&replace.

Add on a well-built plugin API, and this will be nominally competitive with the likes of vim and emacs.

tomrod 6/25/2025|||

Challenge. Accepted.

axpvms 6/25/2025||||

That's pretty handy. I was having to use bash -c "vi myfile.txt" which was a bit annoying.

jcotton42 6/25/2025||

If you were doing that to invoke WSL, note that these days you can do `wsl command arg arg arg...`

cerved 6/25/2025|||

Probably more like need to use it. Basically nano for windows

DrJokepu 6/25/2025|||

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 6/25/2025|||

That may be the written goal, but I doubt that's the actual reason the project exists.

justsomehnguy 6/25/2025|||

My guess would be there are some people at MS who, somehow, still can do something fun. Because they are not assigned on the another project on how to make OOBE even more miserable.

/rant Today I spent 3 (three) hours trying to setup a new MSI AIO with Windows Pro. Because even though it's would be joined to the local ADDS and managed from there - I need to join some Internet connected network, setup a 3 stupid recovery questions which would make NIST blush and wait another 30 minutes for a forced update download which I cannot skip. Oh, something went wrong - let's repeat the process 3 times.

xeonmc 6/25/2025||

Perhaps those are the things that doesn’t take a Ph.D to develop.

cosignal 6/25/2025|||

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'.

paulfharrison 6/25/2025|||

Here's a scenario. You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?

I've met biologists who enjoy the challenge of vim, but they are rare. nano does the job, but it's fugly. micro is a bit better, and my current recommendation. They are not perfect experiences out of the box. If Microsoft can make that out of the box experience better, something they are very good at, then more power to them. If you don't like Microsoft, make something similar.

hulitu 6/25/2025|||

> You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?

mcedit ?

0points 6/25/2025|||

> You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?

Wrongly phrased scenario. If you are running this cluster for the biologists, you should build a front end for them to "edit SLURM scripts", or you may find yourself looking for a new job.

> A Bioinformatics Engineer develops software, algorithms, and databases to analyze biological data.

You're an engineer, so why don't you engineer a solution?

zamadatix 6/25/2025||||

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 6/25/2025||

TIL PowerShell exists for Linux.

But.. why?

trelane 6/25/2025|||

Well, parts of it do, anyway.

As with .net, it is not intended to let you easily get away from Microsoft.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/whats...

skc 6/25/2025|||

Well why not?

Is there supposed to be a single elected shell for Linux? Powershell on Linux is just one of plenty others.

egorfine 6/25/2025||

I'm not against it. Absolutely go for it.

I just wonder what was the reason to port it and then I would like to have a word with a real living person who is actually using that shell.

WorldMaker 6/25/2025|||

PowerShell lends itself really well to writing cross-platform shell scripts that run the same everywhere you can boot up PowerShell 7+. It's origins in .NET scripting mean that some higher-level idioms were already common in PowerShell script writing even before cross-platform existed, for instance using `$pathINeed = Join-Path $basePath ../sub-folder-name` will handle path separators smartly rather than just trying to string math it.

It's object-oriented approach is nice to work with and provides some nice tools that contrast well with the Unix "everything is text" tooling approach. Anything with a JSON output, for instance, is really lovely to work with `ConvertFrom-Json` as PowerShell objects. (Similar to what you can do with `jq`, but "shell native".) Similarly with `ConvertTo-Json` for anything that takes JSON input, you can build complex PowerShell object structures and then easily pass them as JSON. (I also sometimes use `ConvertTo-Json` for REPL debugging.)

It's also nice that shell script parameter/argument parsing is standardized in PowerShell. I think it makes it easier to start new scripts from scratch. There's a lot of bashisms you can copy and paste to start a bash script, but PowerShell gives you a lot of power out of the box including auto-shorthands and basic usage documentation "for free" with its built-in parameter binding support.

egorfine 6/30/2025||

That's a very good and insightful comment. Thank you!

MattSteelblade 6/25/2025|||

I believe this was the original announcement https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powershell-is-open-so.... I have used it on Linux and it is included by default in Kali and ParrotOS.

0points 6/25/2025||||

It's a windows 11 terminal editor. Don't get confused by the fact that it also works on Linux.

rtpg 6/25/2025||||

I dunno, I spent a lot of years (in high school at least) using Linux but being pretty overwhelmed by using something like vim (and having nobody around to point me to nano).

EDIT.COM, on the other hand... nice and straightforward in my book

kevin_thibedeau 6/25/2025||||

There's no shortage of less technical people using nano for editing on Linux servers. Something even more approachable than that would have a user base.

mikepurvis 6/25/2025|||

Especially noting it's a single binary that's just 222kb on x86_64— that's an excellent candidate to become an "installed by default" thing on base systems. Vim and emacs are both far too large for that, and even vim-tiny is 1.3MB, while being considerably more hostile to a non-technical user than even vim is.

I can definitely see msedit having a useful place.

hulitu 6/25/2025|||

Midnight commander comes with mcedit.

joseda-hg 6/25/2025||||

I dunno, I use edit since I've heard of it instead of figuring out why my vim config breaks on windows

I might use nano via wsl (Or at that point just nvim), but that also has it quirks

It occupies the same space as micro did for me, but it's / it will be preinstalled so it's better (Also a reason I even cared for vi at first)

cAtte_ 6/25/2025|||

well the editor was obviously designed primarily for Windows, not sure why the title says Linux

Gormo 6/25/2025|||

There are already plenty of those, such as jed, mcedit, etc.

This particular application is incredibly basic -- much more limited than even EDIT for DOS.

cool_beanz 6/25/2025||

Nano gang

Gormo 6/30/2025||

Nano's not CUA and doesn't support mouse control, though.

kgwxd 6/25/2025|||

It's a huge improvement over notepad

iknowstuff 6/25/2025|||

I’ll gladly replace vim with it, especially if it has/gets LSP support or searching via ripgrep. I’m using Helix now but like a good tui.

z3ratul163071 6/25/2025||

this is for me, as saner replacement for nano in the terminal, since i hate vi.

pcunite 6/25/2025|

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

samplatt 6/25/2025|

That, the DOS defrag visualisation, and the hex-editing my own savegames is pretty much why I'm a developer today.

diggan 6/25/2025||

Ah, the memory of going to bed while the 500MB harddrive defrags over-night, sleeping next to the endless clicking and spinning

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