Microsoft Edit

Geniunely curious, how projects like these get approved in an org at the scale of Microsoft? Is this like a side project by some devs or part of some product roadmap? How did they convince the leadership to spend time on this?

As they explained, they needed a text editor that works in a command line (for Windows Core server installs), works across SSH (because for a while now Windows included an SSH Server so you can completely manage it through SSH), and can be used by non-vi-experienced Windows administrators (i.e. a modeless editor).

Telling people to use nano would of course have been next to impossible. Much easier to rewrite a DOS-era editor in Rust, naturally.

does nano support mouse usage? It doesn't seem to work for me (but maybe it just needs to be enabled somewhere)

I guess they thought that inheriting 25 years of C code was more trouble than designing a new editor from scratch. But you'd have to ask the devs why they decided to go down that route

This way gets coolness points, HN headlines, makes the programmers who wrote it happy, and probably is a contribution to making a couple of autistic people feel included.

Rust + EDITOR.COM is kind of like remaking/remastering an old video game.

micro would have been an even better choice, the UX is impressively close to something like Sublime Text for a TUI, and very comfortable for those not used to modal editors.

> does nano support mouse usage?

Yes, but you have to put `set mouse` into your nanorc.

This is the first time I've heard of micro. More info here: https://micro-editor.github.io/

A text editor is an obvious target for copilot integration.

nano's great but the shortcuts are a bit oddball, from the perspective of a Windows guy.

> rewrite

This is not a rewrite. Maybe it’s slightly inspired by the old thing, especially with having GUI-style clickable menus (something not seen often in terminal editors), but it’s much more modern.

I still see it as rewrite even if you only use the original as inspiration. But that's just semantics

If they hadn’t called it “edit” you wouldn’t have thought of it as a rewrite.

It's no semantics. It's just a lie

It does seem "modern" in the sense that it is incredibly limited in functionality (EDIT.COM from DOS is much more full-featured) and deviates from well-established UI conventions.

CUA-style menubars aren't that uncommon in textmode editors. Midnight Commander's editor has traditional menubars with much more extensive functionality, as does jedsoft.org's Jed editor. Both of these also support mouse input on the TTY console via GPM, not just within a graphical terminal.

Each group needs to do something and they come up with the ideas. Sometimes it is driven by various leaders, e.g. “use copilot”. Sometimes it is an idea from some hackerdayz event which gets expanded. Sometimes this is driven in research units where you have a bunch of technical people twiddling their thumbs. Sometimes this is an idea that goes through deep analysis and multiple semesters before it gets funding.

Look at the amount of contributors here. This project was probably some strategic investment. It did not come to existence overnight.

I like micro and use it occasionally. I like this even more. I booted up the editor and instantly thought “it would be nice if there was a clickable buffer list right about…” and then realized my mouse was hovering over it. My next instant thought was that micro should have implemented this feature a long time ago

It doesn’t have a menu for windows devs, and is supposed to be small and light. Two strikes against.

The developer actually explained, on Hacker News just over a month ago, some of the engineering choices that ruled out nano.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961