Microsoft's new editor runs on the command line and is written in Rust

At Microsoft Build, there were not only the big announcements, which mainly revolved around the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), but also smaller innovations, including some open-source projects.

In addition to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Microsoft Edit, a new command line editor, is now available as an open-source project.

Lean and in Rust

The editor is not intended to offer a wide range of functions, but above all to be slim. It is just under 250 KB in size. To keep it simple to use, it is deliberately not a modal editor like Vim. The blog post announcing Microsoft Edit refers to the “How Do I Exit Vim?” memes that can be found in some Reddit posts, among others.

Microsoft has published the source code on GitHub, and a look at the repository shows that the code is 100% written in Rust.

As befits a command line editor, all functions are accessible via keyboard shortcuts, which are based on the shortcuts in Microsoft's source code editor Visual Studio Code.

According to the announcement, Microsoft Edit is in an early phase and currently only offers rudimentary functions: The editor can open multiple files simultaneously and switch between files using a keyboard shortcut. It can optionally wrap lines automatically. The search and replace function processes regular expressions.

Moving into Windows

Microsoft Edit is currently available for both Windows and Linux via the GitHub repository. In the coming months, Microsoft plans to distribute a preview version via the Windows Insider program and later integrate it into Windows 11.

According to the blog post, the motivation for the new command line editor was the announcement that the MS-DOS editor is only included in the 32-bit versions of Windows, but not in the 64-bit versions, and needs a successor from Microsoft's perspective.

Despite the early stage, Microsoft Edit already has the version number 1.0.0.

(rme)