msedit

Launch the editor with an empty buffer

$ msedit

$ msedit [path/to/file]

$ msedit [path/to/file]:[line]

$ msedit [path/to/file]:[line]:[column]

$ msedit [file1] [file2] [file3]

msedit [OPTIONS] [FILE[:LINE[:COLUMN]]]...

msedit is a lightweight, modeless, terminal-based text editor developed by Microsoft and written in Rust. It draws inspiration from the classic MS-DOS Editor but provides a modern interface with input controls similar to VS Code. Unlike modal editors like Vim, editing is immediate with no mode switching required. It features a menu bar, status bar, mouse support, UTF-8 handling, LF/CRLF conversion, and a localized UI supporting multiple languages. The binary is less than 250 KB.
On Linux the executable is named msedit to avoid conflicts with existing edit commands. On Windows it is simply edit.

-h, --help

Print help information

Print version information

On Linux, the executable name varies between edit (from GitHub binary) and msedit (from distro packages) depending on installation method. Has an optional dependency on ICU for Search and Replace functionality. Requires a Rust nightly toolchain to build from source. As a relatively new tool (2025), it lacks the plugin ecosystem of established editors.

Microsoft Edit was announced at Build 2025 in May 2025 and simultaneously open-sourced under the MIT license. It was created because 64-bit versions of Windows lacked a default CLI text editor. The project has gained significant community interest with over 13,000 GitHub stars. It will ship pre-installed with future Windows 11 builds.

nano(1), vim(1), emacs(1), micro(1)