Today at the Build conference, Microsoft is presenting its own command-line text editor. The editor will be accessible on Windows by using “edit” on the command line, allowing developers to edit files on the command line. This is part of a series of enhancements aimed at improving the developer experience on Windows.
Edit on Windows is an open-source project from Microsoft that allows developers to edit files directly on the command line, just like vim, without having to switch to another program or window. Edit is small and lightweight, its size does not exceed 250 KB. All Edit menu items have keyboard shortcuts, and you can open multiple files and switch between them with ctrl + P. Microsoft has also added search and replace to Edit, as well as support for case sensitive characters and regular expressions. Edit also supports word wrapping.
“The need for a default CLI text editor on 64-bit versions of Windows prompted us to create Edit,” explains Christopher Nguyen, Windows Terminal product manager. “The 32-bit versions of Windows come with MS-DOS Edit or, but the 64-bit versions don’t have the CLI editor installed.”
Microsoft also wanted to avoid the “how do I exit vim?” meme, so it created its own text editor instead of relying on other available options. “Because we wanted to avoid that for the built-in default editor, we decided we needed a modeless editor for Windows (as opposed to a modal editor where new users would have to memorize the different modes and how to switch between them),” Nguyen says.
Editor for Windows will be available in the Windows Insider program in the coming months. You can find more information about Editing in the Microsoft GitHub repository.
Microsoft is also rebranding Windows Dev Home as Windows Advanced Settings. “Windows Extended Settings allows developers to easily control and personalize their Windows experience,” said Pavan Davuluri, head of the Windows division. Instead of being a standalone app, it simply opens up additional switches in the main Windows 11 Settings interface, including the ability to enable File Explorer with GitHub management details.
