Microsoft Releases Classic MS-DOS Editor For Linux

Microsoft has released a modern, open-source version of its classic MS-DOS Editor -- built with Rust and compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's now simple called 'Edit.' Ars Technica reports:
Aside from ease of use, Microsoft's main reason for creating the new version of Edit stems from a peculiar gap in modern Windows. 'What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows,' writes [Christopher Nguyen, a product manager on Microsoft's Windows Terminal team] while referring to the command-line interface, or CLI. '32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS editor, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox.'

Linux users can download Edit from the project's GitHub releases page or install it through an unofficial snap package. Oh, and if you're a fan of the vintage editor and crave a 16-bit text-mode for your retro machine that actually runs MS-DOS, you can download a copy on the Internet Archive.

At 250KB, the new Edit maintains the lightweight philosophy of its predecessor while adding features the original couldn't dream of: Unicode support, regular expressions, and the ability to handle gigabyte-sized files. The original editor was limited to files smaller than 300KB depending on available conventional memory -- a constraint that seems quaint in an era of terabyte storage. But the web publication OMG! Ubuntu found that the modern Edit not only 'works great on Ubuntu' but noted its speed when handling gigabyte-sized documents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.