Microsoft Actually Did Something Right

It seems a million years ago that I first used edit.com. It's not a website, it was an MS-DOS executable.

I've written before here and here of my early days with computing. These were the pre-Windows years. Everything was done on a command line, and many of the executable files had a .com extension. These days they are all .exe extensions.

Edit was a menu-driven DOS text editor. It shipped with MS-DOS 5.0 in 1991, and frankly, I don't remember exactly when I got my hands on that. It became the go-to app for batch files and configuration files.

Windows 10/11 Era

One of the more frustrating things about flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows is (or was) the lack of a decent text editor in the Windows terminal world. I never found anything I liked. I use Nano in Linux, and vaguely remembered a time when Microsoft had something similar. For simple editing of flat text files, though, it was either Notepad, or Notepad++, both of which are graphical apps.

I was ecstatic to discover Microsoft had re-released edit for their command line interfaces. It allows me to continue working in the terminal's window instead of having to maneuver another window to meet the need of the moment. The utter simplicity of the tool makes it wonderful.

I am writing this article using edit. It is a joy.

Thanks, Microsoft! I can't remember the last time I truly liked something you did.

Get edit here, or use winget in a terminal: winget install Microsoft.Edit .