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edit — the MS-DOS EDIT.COM editor, reborn for Linux

edit is a Linux reimplementation of Microsoft's MS-DOS EDIT.COM text editor. It faithfully recreates the DOS look-and-feel — the blue background, the pull-down menu bar, the F-key bindings, the status line — while being fully UTF-8 / Unicode native under the hood. It is written in Rust using the ratatui + crossterm terminal stack.

Current version: 0.4.0.

Where edit is headed: the MyOS text editor

edit is developed as a standalone editor today, but its destiny is to ship as the built-in text editor component of MyOS — a Linux-based operating-system project (this repository lives under the MyOS-2026/ tree). Everything in edit is built with that future in mind: a single, minimally dependent binary; no X11/Wayland requirement; UTF-8 correctness everywhere; and a small, auditable sandboxed plugin surface. When MyOS ships, edit is the editor you'll reach for at the terminal.

Feature overview

• DOS-faithful TUI — blue background, pull-down menus, F-key bindings, status bar; three themes (classic, high-contrast, plain).
• Full keyboard menu navigation — F10 / Alt+<letter> to enter, arrows + Enter + Esc to drive every menu (Feature 009).
• UTF-8 / Unicode native with legacy code-page transcoding: CP437, CP850, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, plus UTF-16 LE/BE BOM auto-detection.
• Grapheme-aware editing — cursor movement and editing respect grapheme clusters.
• Visible text selection — Shift+arrow / Shift+Home/End keyboard selection and mouse press-drag, drawn with a reverse-video highlight (distinct from search matches).
• Full mouse support — click to position the caret, drag to select, double-click to select a word and triple-click a line, a right-click context menu (Cut/Copy/Paste/Select All), plus scrollbars with click/drag and mouse-wheel scrolling on every scrollable surface.
• Interactive Find & Replace dialogs (Ctrl+F / Ctrl+H) with regex, case, whole-word and wrap-around toggles, live "X of Y" match highlighting, and Find Next/Prev (F3/F2).
• Go to Line (Ctrl+G) — jump the cursor to a typed line number.
• Word-wise editing — Ctrl+Left/Ctrl+Right move by a word, Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right extend the selection by a word, and Ctrl+Backspace/Ctrl+Delete delete a word as one undo step.
• Syntax highlighting for C (.c/.h), Python, Shell, YAML, Markdown, Rust, JSON, and TOML.
• Multi-file editing — a clickable buffer tab bar below the menu bar (with an unsaved marker and ✕ close box) plus buffer cycling (F6 / Shift+F6).
• Auto-save & crash recovery (EDIT-RECOVERY-V1 format) plus session restore.
• External-file watching — prompts to reload when a file changes on disk.
• Soft-wrap mode (non-DOS extension) toggled with Alt+Z.
• Rhai plugin system — sandboxed syntax highlighters, keybindings, and menu items with a one-time consent model.

Table of contents

Page	What's inside
Installation	Prerequisites, building from source, packaging, supported targets
Getting Started	First launch, the UI tour, basic editing workflow
Keybindings	The complete keyboard reference
CLI Reference	Every command-line flag
Encodings	UTF-8, legacy code pages, UTF-16, line endings, the hygiene philosophy
Configuration	config.toml, themes, recovery/session/log file locations
Plugin Development	The Rhai plugin API, manifest format, sandbox, worked example
Architecture	High-level design and module breakdown
Development	Contributor guide: workflow, branches, build & test targets
Roadmap	Shipped features and open follow-ups
FAQ	Practical questions and answers

Quick start

# Build the release binary
make release

# Open a file
./target/release/edit notes.txt

See Installation and Getting Started for the full path.