Microsoft made several key announcements at its annual Build developer conference on Monday. While the emphasis was on improving and adding new features to agentic functions and artificial intelligence (AI) agents and models, the company also released a new open-source command line text editor for Windows. Dubbed Edit, it arrives as a modeless editor with a Text User Interface (TUI), enabling developers to edit files within the command line.
Microsoft Edit and Its Features
As per Microsoft, Edit is an open source text editor, which means you can build its code yourself or install its latest version from GitHub. It is said to pay homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor but has a more modern interface and offers controls similar to VS Code. Thus, the company says it is more accessible and can be used by editors who are unfamiliar with terminals.
With Edit, the Redmond-based tech giant aims to address the infamous “How do I exit vim?” meme which referenced the difficulty in exiting the Vim text editor, explains Christopher Nguyen, Product Manager II, Windows Terminal at Microsoft. Further, the company also wanted to build a dedicated CLI editor for the 64-bit versions of Windows. While the 32-bit versions ship with MS-DOS Edit, there’s no command line text editor in the 64-bit versions.
To install Edit:
- Download the latest release from Microsoft’s releases page on GitHub
- Extract the archive
- Copy the edit binary to a directory in the system path
- Delete any other files in the archive if they are not required
To build instructions:
- Install RUST programming language
- Install the nightly toolchain:
rustup install nightlyor set the environment variable toRUSTC_BOOTSTRAP=1 - Clone the repository
4, Run cargo build --config .cargo/release.toml --release for a release build
Microsoft says the command line (CLI) text editor is modeless, which eliminates the need for users to remember and recall different modes of operation. The menu options in Edit have keybindings which allows for quick action via keyboard instead of navigating through the user interface (UI) with the mouse. Microsoft says it has a small footprint in the Windows 11 image with a size less than 250kB.
Users can open multiple files in Edits and switch between them by clicking the file list on the lower-right of the screen. It also enables them to find and replace text and toggle word wrapping via the TUI.
The company says Edit will be rolling out to the registered Windows Insider Program developers in the coming months. It will start shipping soon on all Windows 11 devices.
