Hands-On Windows 180: The Return of Microsoft Edit

Summary

Hands-On Windows 180: The Return of Microsoft Edit
Host: Paul Thurrott
Date: March 12, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Paul Thurrott dives into Microsoft Edit, a command-line-based text editor recently (re)introduced by Microsoft for Windows 11. He explores why Microsoft is bringing back this classic-styled editor amid controversies and changes surrounding Notepad, provides a hands-on walkthrough of Edit’s current capabilities, and reminisces about text editing tools from the early days of DOS. Paul demonstrates how to install, open, and use Microsoft Edit, points out its strengths and current limitations, and encourages viewers who crave a lightweight, distraction-free text editing experience to give it a try.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why a New Text Editor? (00:18–01:55)

• Microsoft has made controversial updates to Notepad, including:
  • Addition of tabs, markdown, Copilot AI features, and Microsoft account integration.
• Paul notes, “I’m actually okay with basically all of the additions to Notepad personally, but I’ve seen the complaints...” (01:05).
• Microsoft Edit has emerged in response, aiming to offer a simple, classic, text-based editing experience:
  • Not a replacement but an alternative for users who want to avoid Notepad’s bloat.

2. Background on Microsoft Edit (01:55–03:20)

• Edit is a free, command-line interface (CLI) app from Microsoft:
  • Works on Windows and Linux.
  • Available for download via GitHub ahead of native Windows 11 integration.
• Paul: “If you are an old school Windows user like I am... you may have used Microsoft Editor like this in the past.” (04:54).

3. Hands-on with Microsoft Edit (04:48–11:50)

• Installation and Launching (04:48–05:30):
  • Download from GitHub (github.com/microsoft/edit).
  • Launched directly from the terminal by typing edit.
• User Interface & Features (05:30–11:50):
  • Reminiscent of DOS-era editors, keyboard-centric but with mouse support.
  • Window adapts to size changes and accepts zoom (Ctrl + +).
  • Basic file operations are available: open (Ctrl+O), new (Ctrl+N), save (Ctrl+S).
  • Supports word wrap and visual cues for line breaks.
  • Power-user features:
    • Quick switching between open files (Ctrl+P).
    • Find (Ctrl+F) and Replace (Ctrl+R) functions.
    • Mouse interaction with menu options.
  • Example: Opening markdown files, writing, and saving text.
• Notable quote:

  “It adapts to this window. So if I resize this thing, it resizes with it. If I maximize it, it resizes with it... There’s menus and things like that... And you can actually see it a little bit better.” — Paul Thurrott (05:54)

• Open With Integration (09:45–10:45):
  • By default, Edit isn’t integrated into the Windows Explorer “Open with” dialog.
  • Workaround is to manually select its location (Windows\System32) the first time, making it easier for subsequent use.

4. Features and Limitations (10:45–11:50)

• Strengths:
  • Extremely lightweight (kilobytes in size).
  • Simple, focused, and fast for editing text.
• Current limitations:
  • No support for rich text, formatting, or live markdown rendering.
  • No bold or italic formatting—just plain text.
  • Files like images (e.g., PNG) won’t open properly.
  • Does not appear as an option in “Open with” by default—manual setup required.

5. Nostalgia and Personal Reflections (06:10, 11:20)

• Paul recalls old-school programming editors such as Borland Turbo C and Quick C.
• Emphasizes the calming, focused experience Edit offers:

  “There’s something very calming and focused about it, especially when you bring it up in a full screen interface...” (11:20)

---

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Notepad’s new direction:

  “They added all this Copilot stuff. There’s superfluous UI about what’s happening and Microsoft account sign in so you can get to your AI credit balance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.” — Paul Thurrott (00:45)

• Nostalgia for old editors:

  “If you are an old school Windows user like I am... you may have used Microsoft Editor like this in the past.” — Paul Thurrott (04:54)

• On Edit’s main appeal:

  “It’s super lightweight. This is kilobytes in size, not megabytes. It's tiny... And it’s a cool app. I really like it. So I hope you like it too.” — Paul Thurrott (11:17)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:18–01:55: Notepad controversies and Microsoft Edit's emergence.
• 01:55–03:20: Overview of Edit, its history, and where to get it.
• 04:48–05:30: Installing and launching Edit from GitHub.
• 05:30–08:40: Exploring user interface, opening, editing, and saving files.
• 08:40–10:45: Multiple document handling, find/replace features, and navigation.
• 09:45–10:45: Adding Edit to Windows “Open with” and manual Explorer integration.
• 10:45–11:50: Reflections on limitations and lightweight design; closing thoughts and hopes for wider adoption.

---

Summary & Takeaway

Paul Thurrott presents Microsoft Edit as a refreshing, minimalist alternative to Notepad for those nostalgic for or simply desiring a clean, no-frills text editing experience. While not feature-rich or fully integrated into Windows yet, Edit is praised for its speed, focus, and legacy feel. Advanced users and newcomers alike can appreciate its simplicity, provided they don't mind the command-line launch and manual file association. The episode is both a practical guide and an affectionate look at the enduring appeal of simple tools amidst ever-more complex software environments.

Transcript

[A]

Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to look at a text editor. No, not Notepad, a different text editor.

[B]

Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.

[A]

Hello everybody. I'm Paul Throt. Welcome back to Hands on Windows. This week we're going to take a look at a new text editor, a new ish text editor called Microsoft Edit. If you are following Windows 11, which I assume you are if you're watching the show, but you may have heard there's a bunch of controversy around Notepad, the text editor that's been built into Windows for 40 years. Microsoft added tabs to it, which I don't think bothered too many people. But then they added the markdown stuff. They added all this copilot stuff. There's superfluous UI about what's happening and Microsoft account sign in so you can get to your AI credit balance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So I actually, I'm actually okay with basically all of the additions to NOET personally, but I've seen the complaints and we did an episode some months ago where I showed you how you can use that app Alias capability to get back to the older version, the kind of Win32 desktop version of Notepad. But since I want to say probably Last May or May 2025, Microsoft has released another text editor for Windows. They're going to build it into Windows 11. I've been checking. I just installed one of the latest dev builds. That's why you see that text down there in the corner. But it's not in this build. So it's coming someday, they say. This isn't, this is free. It is made by Microsoft, of course. It's a, it's a CLI app, meaning a command line interface. So it's a, a text based app. It works in Windows, of course. It also works in Linux, interestingly. So if you want to download it from the web, you can do that and run it in Linux. If you're, you know, somehow you're a Linux guy and you love Microsoft software. But like I said, it's coming to Windows 11. I think it's honestly pretty glorious. So we'll see. But you can download Edit today from the GitHub website.

[B]

Hey, Paul. Hey, everybody. This episode of Hands on Windows is brought to you by my new close personal friends, ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker's Zero Trust platform takes a proactive and these are the three words you care about. Deny by default approach. That means it's blocking every unauthorized action unless you explicitly say, yeah, you could do that. You can't. Which protects you from both known and unknown threats. Modern attacks hide these days inside endpoints attacker controlled virtual machines. These guys are sneaky sandboxed environments, VM based malware. They're invisible to traditional antivirus software. But guess what? ThreatLocker Zero Trust prevents those VM based attacks before they can launch. ThreatLocker's innovative ring fencing constrains tools and remote management utilities so attackers cannot weaponize them for lateral movement or mass encryption. Threadlocker works in every industry, provides 24.7us based support. It's just the best. They support Windows and Mac environments and they enable comprehensive visibility and control. Just ask Emirates Flight Catering, a global leader in the food industry. Over 13,000 employees. They use Threat Locker. Threat Locker gave Emirates full control of apps and endpoints, improved compliance and delivered seamless security with strong IT support. The CISO of Emirates Flight Catering said this quote, the capabilities, the support and the best part of Threat Locker is how easily it integrates with almost any solution. Other tools take time to integrate, but with Threat Locker it's seamless. That's one of the key reasons we use it. It's incredibly helpful to me as a ciso. I talked to so many people at their Zero trust world last week that said the same thing. Threatlocker is a miracle trusted like global enterprises that just can't afford to be down for one minute. Like JetBlue, Heathrow Airport, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. They all use Threat Locker. Threat Locker consistently receives high honors and industry recognition, a G2, high performer and best support for enterprise. Summer 2025 Peerspot ranked threat locker number one in application control and GetApp's best functionality and features award in 2025. And that's just scratching the surface. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with Threadlocker. Visit threadlocker.com twitch you'll get a free 30 day trial and you can learn more about how Threatlocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com twit. Thank you Threat Locker for supporting Hands on Windows. Now back to Paul.

[A]

And so this is the website for it. So it's just GitHub.com Microsoft Edit little tricky to find the download, but it's here. Download the zip and you can install it and run this thing. And so the way that you do this normally is you run a terminal window and you type edit right. And what's cool about this? Well, there's many things that are cool about this, honestly, but there's nothing here yet. So. But if you are an old school Windows user like I am, and you go back far enough and you remember Ms. Dos, you may have used Microsoft Editor like this in the past. You might have used one as a programmer, you know, for something like Quick See or Borland Turbo C or whatever. Of course those things were basically. I mean, eventually they evolved, but they were primarily and originally solely text based and keyboard based. This one actually works with the mouse, right? And so you can kind of click around and there's menus and things like that. And that's pretty cool. But the thing I like about it the most is it adapts to this window. So if I resize this thing, it resizes with it. If I maximize it, it resizes with it. Obviously if I bump up the text, so I'm hitting Control plus V sorry, Control plus plus the plus sign there. And then you can actually see it a little bit better. So to give you an idea of some of the capabilities, because it's a fairly basic keyboard, it works with keyboard shortcuts, right? So I could go to file and then open file. But you can see here it says control plus zero. So I'll type, sorry, control plus O. I can type that. And it dumps me in my user folder, right? So right now on this computer, what I have is things in OneDrive. So unfortunately I have to click in here a little bit, but that will take a second. That's okay, we can get there. And I'll just go to my two. So these are markdown files. But markdown is text, right? Explain text. So I can open that with this, no problem. And you can see all the text is just running off the side, which is not exactly what I want. But this thing has word wrap, right? And so this is an unfinished. This is a review in progress that I'm writing for an iPhone. But you can kind of see where it's at and, and you can get an idea of what this thing looks like, right? And you can see also that it handles the word wrap with these dots here. So this is all, this is all one line to this text file. To us visually, it's forming like a paragraph with word wrap. But it's the ninth line, this is a space of the tenth line and then a space for the next line. You can do things like control N and to start a new file. So this is a text document. I'll just type something here. This is some more text, etc. If I do control s, it's going to try to Save this thing. I actually don't want to save it there, but I will anyway, just to make the point. But it's a text file and I can just enter and save. And so you can see it has that name up here in the tab. And it also does find and replace. Let me go back. Well, actually, I should say there's a kind of a power user feature in here where even though I had a document open, but then I started a new document, the other document's still in the editor. And so instead it's not Control plus T or it's not Control tab for some reason, but if I type Control P, I get this kind of alt tab like interface for the various documents that are open right now in the editor. So I can select that thing that was previously loaded and go right back to where we were. And then I can go Control P again and go back, you know, to the other one, obviously. Right. Control F find. And then you can use the, the mouse here to do some of the options. Control. Nope, sorry. Control R is replace. Right. They don't really. Control H is the more typical one for that, but it gives you a way to enter a word. And then I don't want to screw up my document, but you get the idea. We can only do a whole word instead of a partial word and we could do a replace all if we want. So it works with the mouse. Pretty nice. So I really like this thing, and as I've been using it, I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm getting older or something, but I want to use this. The trouble is, by default, there's no way to launch this from Explorer, right? So I'm going to close this window and I'm going to go to that same folder. Right? So that's the folder we were just in. You can see the iPhone review file. What I'd like to do is right click and say open with and then choose that app. Now, you can't do that by default, but actually I, I added it. And the trick is you have to know where the app is. And so in this case, I happen to know because I looked it up, it's in the system 32 folder inside of the Windows folder, right? So let me get past the ease there. And then you can see right here. There it is. So that's the app. So once you know where that thing is, you could right click on a file like this and say open with and choose another app. More apps and choose an app. And like I said, it's in the this folder. And then we go to system 32. Go down. Well, you got to go past there to hit go. Yeah, go past the ease. And then there's Edit. Okay. Now I don't want to do this all the time necessarily, but you might. For now I'll just say just once and then it actually opens in the. It opens like you would expect right now it's gone back to the original settings and all that stuff. But pretty cool. And I believe now that I've done that, I should be able to see Edit. Net list. Yeah, there you go. So that's pretty cool. There are other things it doesn't quite do. If you are old enough or have been around long enough to remember any of the text based formatting stuff we might have done in a program like WordPerfect for example, I think. I'm sure Microsoft Word did this as well. They would actually show you formatting in the document. So this supports literally just basic text. So there's no way to do bold or italics or anything like that. That'd be kind of fun if they could figure that out. I don't see why they couldn't. But you know, between the open width and just the basic functionality of it, it's super lightweight. This is kilobytes in size, not megabytes. It's tiny. It's going to be included in Windows. Like I said, it's just there or will soon just be there. And it's a cool app. I really like it. So I hope you like it too. There's something very calming and focused about it, especially when you bring it up like in a full screen interface like this, you know, now I'm stuck in that folder again so I'm not going to find anything to open here, but probably not going to find anything. It's. It will not behave nicely if I try to open a ping file, I can tell you that. But a cool app nonetheless. So hopefully you found this interesting and informative. Maybe we'll get a couple of converts to Microsoft Edit either way. Thank you so much for watching. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the show at Twitt tv. H O W and again, thank you for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. You can learn more about that program if you're not a member at Twit tv. Club Twit. Thanks. I'll see you next week.

[B]

Hey everybody, Leo Laporte here and I'm gonna bug you one more time to join Club Club Twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion, and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more. We can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you find out more at TWiT TV Club TWiT.

[A]

Thank you so much.