Comment by andrewstuart
1 year ago
Edit for DOS was my favorite editor.
All the keys worked as you expect. You could select text with shift. It had find and a replace. That’s a lot more than most editors give you without config fiddling and arcane key commands.
Those simple things get almost everything I need for operating system maintenance.
Edit was the pure distilled essence of an editor.
It was a work of art really.
It was okay when it came out because the alternative was EDLIN (DOS version of ed). But IIRC, it had a 64KB file size limitation which was a problem.
It came out with MS-DOS 5, and by that time there were loads of alternatives already available. There were ports of Unix and Big Iron editor programs.
There were loads of native PC text editors, too. SemWare's QEdit had been around since 1985, for example. DR-DOS had had EDITOR for a while, which might indeed have spurred Microsoft into action.
Boxer was a contemporary with MS-DOS EDIT, but that name was a pun on the name of an earlier widespread DOS text editor named Brief, also around for years before EDIT came along.