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Microsoft Edit

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Re: Microsoft Edit

#301
post #19

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…

> 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

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.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#302
post #201

I do not understand the love this project is getting. It was a shit editor when it was introduced; we'd all started using something else years before.

agreed. it's nostalgic sure but it's not a good editor.

It’s for fixing boot.ini on a broken headless vm at 2am, not for software development.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#304

> This editor pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor Oddly, it looks more like Borland's editor.

TurboVision had horizontal scrollbars. Edit never did.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/microsoft-surprises-...

The screen shot says differently.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#305
post #16

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/

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

Re: Microsoft Edit

#306
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

Re: Microsoft Edit

#307

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!

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

Re: Microsoft Edit

#308
post #77
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Edit

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bett…

> 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.…

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).

Re: Microsoft Edit

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

> 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 kn…

> 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.

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