Programming

Depends what it's for. I think a simple CLI text editor like this probably shouldn't have any smarts. Obviously an IDE like VSCode or IntelliJ should.

Where do you draw the line on "smart" features? Tab should not add indent spaces? Encoding or newline mechanisms? Determining EOF newline?

For a very basic default editor, I would expect it to include only what I typed, no "smart" features, no IDE features, nothing else, and use CRLF (on Windows) for newlines with at most a setting to configure it in the editor for that session.

Basically, I wouldn't expect anything more than what nano does. If I want a fancy CLI editor, I'll install one. At its core though, it should exist only to edit the text content of a text file and do nothing else. It should be as stable as possible, and have as little scope as possible, in my opinion.

With that said, basic text editing features, like undo/redo and cut/copy/paste would be nice. Bonus points if it even works with the system clipboard.

Edit: to add to the question of whether an automatic newline should be added, Windows has no requirement for terminating text documents with newlines, so I would not expect one. What happens in POSIX environments by tools written for those environments seems irrelevant here - if a valid text document in POSIX must be terminated by a newline, then a text editor there would naturally be expected to add one, or at least support adding one, but that has nothing to do with Windows.

The things the author mentioned drive me nuts about visual studio…. Especially trivial completions, like brace pairing, their thirst to add these newb-crutches leads me to backspacing and retyping over and over again, trying to figure out what the editor did that I didn’t even notice and how to undo it. For something that is literally a 20ms muscle memory action for any experienced programmer.

Given the announcement of edit replacing the old 32-bit MS-DOS edit.com with minimal footprint, I was surprised Microsoft considered multi-platform to even be in-scope.

I guess, given it's Rust, it was simple to say "sure, why not". But this ticket shows that you automatically have to discuss and handle multi-platform questions that arise.

MS, please take a look at Metapad for how to build a good basic text editor with some smart features.

Just add .editorconfig support for insert_final_newline.

Honestly, pleasantly surprised that this piece of software exists. I didn't think that Microsoft's policy of "shove 'AI' into as many places as possible" was compatible with things such as having a functional text editor.

/s