Leon Mika

Took a look at Microsoft’s new CLI text editor. There’s no MacOS version yet but Simon Willison has made a Docker image for it, and once I satisfied MacOS’ insatiable fear that I don’t know what I’m doing regarding Terminal and Docker’s access to other files¹, I managed to launch it.

And yeah, works well. Reminds me of EDIT.EXE from my DOS using days.

Since I was running this in Docker, I knew my experience may be slightly off from what’s expected. But one thing I would suggest Microsoft doing if they do want to bring this to the Mac is to have a version that works with terminals with light backgrounds: the grey body text is readable but a bit more contrast would be welcome. Also, adding some Emacs/Readline keyboard bindings would be nice. I found myself pressing Option+Left, which I’ve mapped to Ctrl+W, to try and go back a word, and I kept getting asked if I wanted to close and save the file. Seems like the keyboard bindings are mapped to what is typical on Windows, which I can understand.

But on the whole, I can see this being useful for Windows users that need to duck into a text file when they’re using the CLI. I don’t think it’ll be useful to me — I do know how to quit from Vim — but I frequently need to do this myself whenever I’m using the Terminal, and having to switch modes from CLI to GUI always includes a risk of loosing context. So I could imagine appreciating this if I were a Windows users.

One last thing: I like how they managed to get it down to less than 250kB. A worthy goal for any editor that is not aiming to be feature rich enough to replace your daily driver.