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Edit is now open source

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Edit is now open source

#161

Post by JdeBP »

pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #136
JdeBP wrote: post #131

I have, as they say in the theatre, notes. Lots of notes. Possibly beginning with a request to stop calling these "VT" sequences. Quite a lot of this wouldn't work on an actual DEC Video Terminal. One of the questions I haven't yet answered from research is whether it supports [Control]+[P]. That's another of the non-secret secrets of the original EDIT.

> Possibly beginning with a request to stop calling these "VT" sequences. Quite a lot of this wouldn't work on an actual DEC Video Terminal. That is incredibly pedantic even by your standards.

And that is a personal attack, which I'm sure Thomas Dickey would not appreciate being the target of, since this is M. Dickey's oft-made point.

Read https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#vt100_... and learn.

Re: Edit is now open source

#162

Post by arghwhat »

eviks wrote: post #159
arghwhat wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More features ≠ higher quality.

But lack of useful features = lower quality, so you're just arguing for a permanent state of poor quality for some strange change-resisting reason and the fact that alternatives exist (so? why should that stop your alternative from becoming better?)

No. Adding superfluous features to an intentionally minimal baseline program defacto reduces it's quality by making it less suitable for its task and more likely to have defects.

There's decades worth of options for fatter editors out there. Tools like nano (and now edit) is ubiquitous because they are not such editors, and people need a reliable baseline without such features.

Re: Edit is now open source

#163

Post by JdeBP »

sedatk wrote: post #15
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Edit for DOS was my favorite editor. All the keys worked as you expect. You could select text with shift. It had find and a replace. That’s a lot more than most editors give you without config fiddling and arcane key commands. Those simple things get almost everything I need for operating system maintenance. Edit was the pure distilled essence of an editor. It was a work of art really.

It was okay when it came out because the alternative was EDLIN (DOS version of ed). But IIRC, it had a 64KB file size limitation which was a problem.

It came out with MS-DOS 5, and by that time there were loads of alternatives already available. There were ports of Unix and Big Iron editor programs.

There were loads of native PC text editors, too. SemWare's QEdit had been around since 1985, for example. DR-DOS had had EDITOR for a while, which might indeed have spurred Microsoft into action.

Boxer was a contemporary with MS-DOS EDIT, but that name was a pun on the name of an earlier widespread DOS text editor named Brief, also around for years before EDIT came along.

Re: Edit is now open source

#164

Post by JdeBP »

arghwhat wrote: post #123
TZubiri wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you gotta make sure that hotkeys get passed in every keyboard configuration. Ctrl, CTRL Shift, Ctrl Caps, Alt, how do tabs work? Etc.. That something looks simple but is actually difficult is an error we all make

This is a console application, it does not manage the keyboard directly and there is nothing windows specific here. All existing editors do these things well already, nothing that required writing yet another editor.

Actually, there is Windows-specific stuff in the new EDIT. When built for Windows, it uses a one-foot-in-each-camp mixture of high-level and low-level console I/O, high-level for output and low-level for input.

https://github.com/microsoft/edit/blob/main/src/sys/windows....

Re: Edit is now open source

#165

Post by ladyanita22 »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #143

The new Microsoft Edit is good. It's not as good as EDIT.COM, but it gets the job done. A couple of peeves: it lacks word count (which would be very useful), and there is no way to escape to shell (which would render it more usable for light scripting tasks). I don't mind it too much, but I dislike how it hijacks the selected terminal font in Windows Terminal, how you can't hit Esc to close the menus in a Linux termi…

Why is it not as good as EDIT.COM?

Re: Edit is now open source

#166

Post by croes »

JdeBP wrote: post #101
croes wrote: 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?

If it’s not the same then it’s a bad idea to give it the same name.

Imagine searching for a tutorial or a bug fix.

Re: Edit is now open source

#167

Post by lhecker »

int_19h wrote: post #146
lhecker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much exclusively binary size. Even with AOT C# is still too large. Otherwise, I wouldn't have minded using it. I believe SIMD is a requirement for writing a performant editor, but outside of that, it really doesn't need to be a language like C or Rust.

Is there any context in which .NET runtime wouldn't be available on Windows (even if an older version, e.g. 4.x)? Because when you can rely on that and thus you don't need to do AOT, the .exe size for C# would likely be an order of magnitude smaller.

I intended for this editor to be cross-platform and didn't want to take on a large runtime dependency that small Docker images or similar may not be willing to bundle.

Re: Edit is now open source

#168

Post by steveklabnik »

lhecker wrote: post #80
steveklabnik wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to hear about the use of nightly features. I haven’t had time to dig into the usage, but that was something I was surprised by!

Up until around 2 months ago the project actually built with stable Rust. But as I had to get the project ready for release it became a recurring annoyance to write shims for things I needed (e.g. `maybe_uninit_fill` to conveniently fill the return value of my arena allocator). My breaking point was the aforementioned `LinkedList` API and its lack of cursors in stable Rust. I know it's silly, but this, combined with…

Thank you!

> I know it's silly,

Nah, what's silly is LinkedList.

> I think it may be worth optimizing `Vec::splice`.

If this is upstream-able, you should try! Generally upstream is interested in optimizations. sort and float parsing are two things I remember changing significantly over the years. I didn't check to see what the differences are and how easy that actually would be...

Re: Edit is now open source

#169

Post by rendaw »

arghwhat wrote: post #3

Yay for finally having a default text editor that works over ssh. Managing windows servers over ssh is a bit of a pain without. They could just have packaged nano, but oh well.

I was impressed that they actually looked at other editors in the ecosystem, I wasn't expecting that. Aside from WSL stuff does Windows distribute any other 3rd party utilities?

Re: Edit is now open source

#170

Post by alexrp »

lhecker wrote: 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…

> Since Zig is not internally supported at Microsoft just yet (chain of trust, etc.)

Is there something about Zig in particular that makes this the case, or is it just an internal politics thing?

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