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Edit is now open source

devblogs.microsoft.com

101–110 of 191 posts

Re: Edit is now open source

#101
post #45

And again a case of bad naming from MS because it’s too basic to be distinguishable.

Distinguishable from the tool of that name, that came with the operating system (and prior Microsoft ones) for many years, that it is deliberately intended to provide a rough workalike 64-bit replacement for?

Re: Edit is now open source

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

64 bit Windows, the only sort now with W11, doesn’t have MS-DOS support, so doesn’t have the old edit to start with.

Didn't know 32-bit Windows was completely gone.

It's not even that 32-bit Windows is gone. It's that NTVDM is (years ago) gone. See discussion elsewhere on this very page.

Re: Edit is now open source

#103

It's 2025 and Windows got what *nix got in the 1970s. Better late than never!

The ironic thing is that people said the same as you just did when EDIT originally came along in the 1990s. DR-DOS had had EDITOR for a while, and there was also a healthy shareware trade in DOS text editors, including even some DOS ports of Stevie. It was late then. But the computer magazines fawned over it.

Re: Edit is now open source

#104
post #12

Interesting how we always go in circles. edit.cmd was one of the first programs I ever used. Now it's back rewritten as a Windows 10+ program in Rust? Yet it looks and works just the same as 30 years ago!

You probably mean edit.com, which is what I thought of when I saw this post.

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

Re: Edit is now open source

#105
post #53

Hey all! I made this! I really hope you like it and if you don't, please open an issue: https://github.com/microsoft/edit To respond to some of the questions or those parts I personally find interesting: The custom TUI library is so that I can write a plugin model around a C ABI. Existing TUI frameworks that I found and were popular usually didn't map well to plain C. Others were just too large. The arena allocator e…

Can you say more about the chain of trust issue? Does Rust also not have that problem? Or are you using mrustc to bootstrap rustc?

Re: Edit is now open source

#106
> While it is relatively simple to learn the magic exit incantation, it’s certainly not a coincidence that this often turns up as a stumbling block for new and old programmers.

What’s even simpler is changing the awful defaults and adding the menu to make this a non-issue at a tiny fraction of the time it would take to write a new editor.

> we decided that we wanted a modeless editor for Windows (versus a modal editor where new users would have to remember different modes of operation and how to switch between them)

New users could do everything in insert mode with the power of modes always in the background. Also you don’t need to remember how to switch as you can just show those key binds in either your menu or status bar if you think it’s very important, there is plenty of space looking at the screenshots

Such a wasted opportunity to use something powerful and extensible for rather flimsy reasons

Re: Edit is now open source

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be a great text-mode IDE with the addition of some LSP, tree-sitter and DAP support. There is already an open issue about possibly adding support for tree-sitter grammars for fast syntax highlighting, but they do mention that this requires some sort of optional plugin system to avoid bloating up the codebase severely (for example, the tree-sitter grammars within the Helix editor take up hundreds of megabyt…

That just feels like scope creep. Notepad would also be neat with some better keybinding support, plugins, lsp, ... - but then it wouldn't be notepad, and theres countless not notepads out there. Tools like nano (well, pico) exist to provide a reliable and always available minimum feature set. If you expand it, then you end up with something that is neither the minimum nor capable enough to sensibly compete with full…

No, it would still be notepad, but a higher quality one where especially users who don’t know better wouldn’t have to suffer as much from bad/lacking functionality

Re: Edit is now open source

#108
post #53

Hey all! I made this! I really hope you like it and if you don't, please open an issue: https://github.com/microsoft/edit To respond to some of the questions or those parts I personally find interesting: The custom TUI library is so that I can write a plugin model around a C ABI. Existing TUI frameworks that I found and were popular usually didn't map well to plain C. Others were just too large. The arena allocator e…

> So, why not have fun learning something new, writing most things myself? I definitely learned tons working on this, which I can now use in other projects as well.

Because presumably you should have been doing it mostly for the benefit of Windows users, and wasting time because it’s a fun personal learning exercise means those users would suffer getting an underpowered app

Re: Edit is now open source

#109
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing this isn’t just to optimize for binary size. If you have the resources to avoid third party dependencies you eliminate the burden of having to build a trust case for the third party supply chain. That is the number one reason we sometimes reimplement things instead of using third party packages where I work: the risk from dependencies along with the effort required to establish that we can trust them is…

Microsoft has recently said AI writes 30% of their code. Reimplementing things isn’t as expensive as it once was.

How much cost reduction does 30% ai written code translate to? It's easy to imagine that ai doesn't write the most expensive lines of code. So it might correspond to 10% cost reduction.

10% is nothing to scoff at, but I don't think it should factor into the decision to rewrite existing packages or trust third parties if you're very security minded.

Re: Edit is now open source

#110
post #108
post #53

Hey all! I made this! I really hope you like it and if you don't, please open an issue: https://github.com/microsoft/edit To respond to some of the questions or those parts I personally find interesting: The custom TUI library is so that I can write a plugin model around a C ABI. Existing TUI frameworks that I found and were popular usually didn't map well to plain C. Others were just too large. The arena allocator e…

> So, why not have fun learning something new, writing most things myself? I definitely learned tons working on this, which I can now use in other projects as well. Because presumably you should have been doing it mostly for the benefit of Windows users, and wasting time because it’s a fun personal learning exercise means those users would suffer getting an underpowered app

At the same time I think some of the most brilliant things to come from Microsoft are products of individual initiative, and when the project ends up compromised for some reason I get the idea that it's some kind of institutional higher-ups that do the damage after the fact.

Maybe just some residual instinct left over from times past when more people like Ballmer were still prominent, and they were not as user-enabling as today in some ways?

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