Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

Build Microsoft has brought back an old favorite to the Windows command line interface: Edit, a text editor harking back to the halcyon days of DOS and text mode applications.

Edit is the antithesis to where Microsoft seems to be headed. It is compact, weighing in at less than 250 KB, and blessedly free of the AI afflictions plaguing Windows nowadays.

Announced at Build, the open source tool can be downloaded from a GitHub repository (the source can also be built if required) and run from a command line. Firing it up is enough to catapult the user back to the time of MS-DOS 5, when Edit first debuted.

While DOS (and Windows) were not short of third-party editors, the original Microsoft Editor holds a special place in the hearts of users of a certain age. It superseded Edlin, a line editor, and lingered on in 32-bit versions of Windows before quietly disappearing after Windows 10.

But that was OK. Windows had Notepad, right?

Well, wherever a person stands on what has happened to Notepad in the last few years, a text editor has been a notable omission from the Windows command line experience. Yes, there are plenty of alternatives - Nano, Vim - but something built-in was missing.

This brings us to the arguable highlight of this year's Microsoft Build: an open source text editor written in Rust that will eventually ship as part of Windows 11 (a preview will show up for Windows Insiders in the coming months).

The Text-based User Interface (TUI) application is reminiscent of its predecessor but also features nods to the modern world. There's mouse support, Unicode works, and menu options have keybindings. Word wrap is supported, as is Find & Replace. Microsoft said: "There is also Match Case and Regular Expression support as well."

We launched it and, despite its preview nature, the application seemed snappy and stable. It was also handy for quickly editing a text file from the command line without resorting to a third-party solution.

In a world increasingly dominated by the latest AI innovations and applications that seem to grow in size with every release, the arrival (or perhaps return) of Edit, with its TUI and compact binary, is something we welcome.

While there are more compact editors and plenty of other options available, firing up Edit is a blast from the past with a bit of modernity stirred in. ®