Microsoft surprises MS-DOS fans with remake of ancient text editor that works on Linux

Last month, Microsoft released a modern remake of its classic MS-DOS Editor, bringing back a piece of computing history that first appeared in MS-DOS 5.0 back in 1991. The new open source tool, built with Rust and simply called "Edit," works on Windows, macOS, and—in a twist that would have seemed unlikely three decades ago—Linux.

The cross-platform availability has delighted longtime users who never expected to see Microsoft's text editor running on their preferred operating system. "30 years of waiting, and I can use MS Edit on Linux," wrote one Reddit user, capturing the nostalgic appeal of running a genuinely useful version of a Microsoft DOS utility on a Unix-like system.

An animated GIF from Microsoft showing the modern "Edit" application in action. (Credit: Microsoft)

The original MS-DOS Editor represented a major step forward for Microsoft's command-line text-editing capabilities at the time of its release. Before 1991, DOS users suffered through EDLIN, a line-based editor so primitive and user-hostile that many people resorted to typing "COPY CON filename.txt" and hoping for the best. MS-DOS Editor changed that by introducing concepts that seem basic today: a full-screen interface, mouse support, and pull-down menus you could actually navigate without memorizing cryptic commands.

And those cryptic commands persist today in some Linux editors, like Vim, a modal text editor where users must switch between different modes for editing versus navigating text, which famously confuses newcomers. "Many of you are probably familiar with the 'How do I exit vim?' meme," wrote Christopher Nguyen, a product manager on Microsoft's Windows Terminal team, in a blog post about Edit. "While it is relatively simple to learn the magic exit incantation, it's certainly not a coincidence that this often turns up as a stumbling block for new and old programmers."

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 Nguyen 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."

An animated GIF from Microsoft showing the modern "Edit" application in action. (Credit: Microsoft)

So far, the development community seems to be giving Microsoft's new open source tool a mixed-to-positive reception. But the cross-platform nature of the new tool editor has already excited some developers. "Microsoft released a new terminal text editor! It's called Microsoft Edit, it's open source, it's tiny (about 250KB as a Rust binary) and it works cross-platform," wrote independent AI researcher Simon Willison on X on Saturday. "They built it for Windows 11 - I've been trying it out on my Mac and it's a nice alternative to Vim or nano."

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.

The hallowed legacy of “Edit”

When MS-DOS 5.0 launched in 1991, the computing world looked vastly different from today. A typical PC might include a 286 or 386 processor, a mere 4MB of RAM was considered wildly generous, and the Internet remained largely an academic curiosity. Windows 3.0 had arrived the year before, but MS-DOS still ruled desktop computing on IBM PC clones. For millions of users, MS-DOS Editor became their first introduction to "modern" text editing—a stepping stone between the command-line era and the graphical interfaces that would soon dominate.