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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.

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."

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.

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.

Looking back to when MS-DOS Editor debuted, it's interesting to learn that the original editor shipped in an unusual form. According to Wikipedia, EDIT.COM was actually just a stub that launched the QBasic programming language editor in a different mode—a clever way to reuse existing code while providing a more approachable text-editing experience. Later versions of EDIT.COM became standalone programs as Microsoft phased out QBasic from Windows distributions.

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.

At a time when AI coding assistants and sophisticated IDEs dominate software development, it's fun to think that we may be on the verge of a renaissance in appreciation for simple, fast tools that just work. After all, some tasks are timeless. The fact that Microsoft's 1991 design philosophy from MS-DOS translates so well to 2025 suggests that most fundamental aspects of text editing haven't changed much despite 34 years of tech evolution.