Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu

4 hours ago 1

If you spend a lot time in a terminal on Linux you’ll have preferred command-line text editor, but Microsoft’s recently announced open-source offering, simply called Edit, might be worth checking out — if only so you know you’re not missing out.

Edit is a remake/reboot of the old MS-DOS Editor, updated to suit current sensibilities. Built using Rust, it aims to deliver a user experience that, per its GitHub page, provides “modern interface and input controls similar to VS Code.”

Microsoft says it made Edit “to provide an accessible editor that even users largely unfamiliar with terminals can easily use” on Windows if/when needed, out-of-the-box (as recent versions of Windows do not include a CLI text editor in recent versions).

The arrival of Edit will mean Windows devs aren’t forced to fire up notepad.exe to make a simple shell script edit, but is there any benefit to running the app on Linux?

Note: When I spotlight apps, tools and utilities on this blog, it’s not because I think you (or anyone) “MUST” use them. I simply showcase choices. Whether you choose to use them is up to you.

Why would Linux users use Edit?

Windows is the primary target for Edit since it lacks a built-in CLI text editor natively so the fact you can use Edit on Linux (and macOS) is more of bonus than purpose.

But if you use Linux and VSCode your muscle memory might like the fact Edit shares many of the latter’s keybindings. This could make it easier to slot in to your workflow compared to vim or nano (though I stress it’s not a replacement for either of those).

Not that only avowed VSCode fans will see the appeal.

The simplicity of the text-driven UI (TUI) makes it less complex to learn, while the speed of Edit, even when seeking across lines in giant 1GB+ files, is impressive — both USPs are by design.

Eager to avoid “how to exit vim” memes, Microsoft designed Edit as a modeless text editor (as opposed to a multi-mode one like Vim, where you need to learn how to activate different modes and switch between them as needed).

You can use a mouse or a keyboard to access menus, select lines or regions of text, position the caret, etc which makes using it feel more intuitive in use than the either/or approach of (admittedly more capable) alternatives.

Edit offers up a modest, lightweight set of features (and an equally modest footprint: a mere 250kB out of the box, and fast file opening) including:

Find and Replace (supports Match Case & Regular Expression)
Word wrap on resize (optional)
Set tab/space indentation
Set/change file encoding
Open multiple files

There’s pretty much all there is. Edit has no syntax highlighting, no range of colour schemes, no command prompt, and few creature comforts common in other command line text editors.

Edit is designed to edit text, not tackle complex task better suited to IDEs.

However, since Edit is open source anyone is free to download, modify, contribute, distribute, fork and do whatever else they like with it.

How to Run Edit on Ubuntu

Edit is free, open source software that works on Windows, Linux and macOS (so no, you don’t need to using Windows to make use of it).

Right now there is no official “installer” for Linux, much less Ubuntu, and no unofficial Snap or DEB/PPA that I can find. A couple of Linux distributions already package Edit, including Arch Linux, and Manjaro, so if you use one of those, you can install it properly.

Otherwise, to run Edit on Ubuntu you need to do so manually.

You need download the latest binary from the project GitHub releases page (be sure to select the correct one for your architecture), then extract the package, cd into the extracted folder, and launch the binary each time you want to us it: