Microsoft surprises MS-DOS fans with remake of ancient text editor that works on Linux

Last month, Microsoft released a modern remake of its classic MS-DOS Editor, bringing back a piece of computing history that first appeared in MS-DOS 5.0 back in 1991. The new open source tool, built with Rust and simply called “Edit,” works on Windows, macOS, and—in a twist that would have seemed unlikely three decades ago—Linux.

The cross-platform availability has delighted longtime users who never expected to see Microsoft’s text editor running on their preferred operating system. “30 years of waiting, and I can use MS Edit on Linux,” wrote one Reddit user, capturing the nostalgic appeal of running a genuinely useful version of a Microsoft DOS utility on a Unix-like system.

An animated GIF from Microsoft showing the modern “Edit” application in action. (Credit: Microsoft)

The original MS-DOS Editor represented a major step forward for Microsoft’s command-line text-editing capabilities at the time of its release. Before 1991, DOS users suffered through EDLIN, a line-based editor so primitive and user-hostile that many people resorted to typing “COPY CON filename.txt” and hoping for the best. MS-DOS Editor changed that by introducing concepts that seem basic today: a full-screen interface, mouse support, and pull-down menus you could actually navigate without memorizing cryptic commands.

And those cryptic commands persist today in some Linux editors, like Vim, a modal text editor where users must switch between different modes for editing versus navigating text, which famously confuses newcomers. “Many of you are probably familiar with the ‘How do I exit vim?’ meme,” wrote Christopher Nguyen, a product manager on Microsoft’s Windows Terminal team, in a blog post about Edit. “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.”

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