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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.
Meanwhile, they forced AI Copilot bloat into Notepad, whose singular use-case was supposed to be that it does one thing well without unnecessary features.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
Fun. I must admit I don't really know who this is for, but it seems fun.
Another Microsoft nerd-washing project.
Back in 1993, I would open up binary files in edit and enjoy seeing hearts.
Do Edlin next.
Reminds me of my days on a support line.
"Type edit autoexec.bat....." etc
fake. it's not blue.
Maybe this makes up for them destroying Notepad for some people.
I love edit.
It was my favorite editor back in the old days.
It worked, did the basics really well and got the job done. Glad to see it’s back.
It will take more than nostalgia and rust to tear me away from my neovim setup that has been built up/improved on over the years. Lsp, dap, autocompletion, aliases and bindings for each programming languages. Lazily loaded of course so it’s still snappy.
Manage configuration, and external dependencies such as lsps with nix.
Then have separate nix shells for each project to load tooling and other dependencies in an isolated/repeatable session. Add in direnv to make it more seamless development experience.
I don't understand why they want to go with DLLs for scripting instead of WASM + wamr which is really small. Maybe I'm just really inexperienced in this space.
Microsoft loves to own general terminology like "edit" for their products. I have no idea how this flys.
SqlServer like it's the one that found sql or it's the only product that serves sql.
Did anyone ask for yet another a Microsoft editor on your Linux machine?
Runs on Windows too! It has "Redo", not to be confused with "Undo Undo". Unfixed-width Tabs are a huge leap forward. LF, sans CR, will cut your file sizes in half.
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It'd be nice if they didn't recommend winget for installation though. winget is an egregious security risk that Microsoft has just like pretended follows even minimal security practices, despite just launching four years ago with no protection from bad actors whatsoever and then never implementing any improvements since.
Probably entirely AI-generated.
No musl binary. For glibc Linux distributions only perhaps.
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...