Microsoft is adding a simpler text editor than Notepad to Windows 11 soon

Following the deprecation of WordPad, Microsoft has been adding a lot of features to Notepad, which has led to criticism from users who prefer Notepad for its no-frills simplicity. If you’re such a user, you might be interested to know that Microsoft is bringing a new minimalist text editor to Windows 11—one that runs in the Command Prompt.

It’s called Edit and it “pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor, but with a modern interface and input controls similar to [Visual Studio Code].” Windows Latest took a closer look at a preview version of Edit, and sure enough it’s a svelte and compact text editor only 230KB in size.

Microsoft

You open Edit by typing edit in the Command Prompt and then pressing the Enter key. When Edit is running, you can open text files for barebones text editing. You can jump to a specific line with the go to line command, switch between open documents, and more. But you can’t format the text, use AI summaries, or any other advanced features.

It should be noted that it currently isn’t possible to save files in Edit, so you should copy the finished edited text to another app like Notepad, Visual Studio Code, or even Microsoft Word.

Edit is still going through major development, and right now you can only get it by installing it manually from GitHub. However, Microsoft said in a statement to Windows Latest that the plan is to “ship Edit as the default text editor, but only for the command line.” We don’t know when that’ll happen, but probably not for a few more months at least.