Edit

Edit is a terminal text editor from Microsoft, written in Rust. It pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor and uses input controls similar to VS Code. It targets users who are largely unfamiliar with terminals and need an editor they can pick up without learning modal or keyboard-heavy workflows. It has a dialog-based interface, including an About dialog shown in the project screenshot.

The canonical executable name is "edit", with "msedit" as an alternative name to avoid conflicts with existing commands. Package maintainers are advised to name packages "msedit" and to set an "edit" alias where possible. Search and Replace optionally depends on the ICU library. The library names, symbol prefixes, and versioned exports can be configured at build time through EDIT_CFG_ICU* environment variables. EDIT_CFG_LANGUAGES selects which interface languages are included in the build.

Prebuilt packages are available through WinGet on Windows and Homebrew on macOS, and binaries are published on the GitHub Releases page. On Linux there is an install script that builds from source and installs msedit into ~/.local/bin. It requires Rust, a C compiler, ICU, and curl/wget with tar. Building with nightly Rust, or stable Rust with RUSTC_BOOTSTRAP=1, reduces binary size and slightly improves performance.

Installation

# via WinGet
winget install Microsoft.Edit

# via Homebrew
brew install msedit

# via Install script (Linux, build from source)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/edit/main/assets/install.sh | sh