Microsoft will soon release a minimalistic text editor that can only be used in the Windows command prompt.
Microsoft has been adding new AI functions to Notepad for a while, such as AI that helps with writing text, checks spelling, provides summaries or edits text. This is something that users of the simple text editor don’t always appreciate. For that group, there’s good news: Microsoft is working on Edit, a new minimalistic text editor for Windows 11 that you use from the command prompt.
Compact and Simple
Edit is “inspired by the classic MS-DOS Editor”, Microsoft writes on Github. It has a more modern interface and controls similar to Visual Studio Code. The program is small and light: the preview version is only 230 KB in size.
You open Edit by typing edit in the terminal. You can then open text files for simple editing. Among other things, you can jump to a specific line and switch between documents. More advanced features, such as the previously discussed AI, are deliberately omitted.
Limitations in the Preview
In the preview version, you can’t yet save files in Edit. So if you edit a file, you need to copy the text and paste it into Notepad or Word, for example, to save it. Microsoft is still actively working on the development of Edit, writes Windows Latest.
Only for the Command Prompt
It’s not yet known when exactly the final version will be made available. It will probably take a while. Those who want to test now can manually download the preview from GitHub.