Mastodawn

Seriously, just stop (or use Linux)

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Wasn't there a lurking edit.exe or edit.cmd somewhere inside C:\WINDOWS\system32? Would make an interesting replacement to the enshittified "Not-e-pad". But, then, I haven't used Windows since Windows 10 was still a novelty (and what definitely pushed me to Linux... Arch Linux btw), so maybe I'm very old ("I'm old, Dean, very old") to recall of a MS-DOS relic.

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AnUnusualRelic

Wasn’t there a version of ed in DOS at one point? Or am I mis remembering?

That could still lurk somewhere in windows’ maze of directories somewhere…

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SpikesOtherDog 3d ago

A 64-bit version of edit seems to be in the works. You can cli install it for now, but MS is promising to include it eventually.

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/

Edit command line text editor

Learn how to use Edit, a command-line text editor, in Windows.

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Dæmon S.3d ago

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Good question. I'm not sure. I guess no, because, as far as I know, ed is a GNU editor which allows for composing and editing files in a REPL-like environment (whose specific commands, apart from "q" to quit, I'm yet to learn)

The "edit" I'm referring to was a spiritual antecessor or cousin of vim, emacs and nano. It was a TUI, full with a functional menubar accessible through keyboard arrow keys. I remember it having a blue background with gray/white text.

I remember with quite a certainty it was a thing for Windows XP. Was invokeable by using "edit filename.txt" in cmd.

However, I also remember having manually copied some executables across diferent Windows versions in order to test and see whether these old executables would work. I remember having successfully ran Windows XP's calc.exe in some later Windows version, relying on the compatibility layer ("ntvdm", I guess?). I remember doing the same for 16-bit, MS-DOS programs, but I don't remember whether "edit" MS-DOS programs was included in post-XP Windows versions, or if I manually copied it from XP.

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AnUnusualRelic 3d ago

Maybe it’s edit I’m remembering. It was a long time ago, and I stopped using windows seriously around 3.11, so I never paid much attention to what was on that partition. It was only there to run steam (and a few other games).

I suppose I should have switched to a console, but it never even occurred to me at the time.