Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal'

[Mesum-Hussain]

I was wondering how amazing it would be if this project evolved into a lightweight version of VS Code that runs directly in the terminal — bringing the modern editing experience developers love into a fully terminal-based environment.

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🌟 Proposed Features

To achieve this, I’d love to see the following four features added:

1. File Tree
2. Integrated Terminal (Shell to run code)
3. Tabs
4. Extensions / Plugin Support

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💡 Why These Features Matter

• Features 1, 2, and 3 are essential for a modern text-editing experience — they’re practically non-negotiable.
• Feature 4 would be a major bonus, enabling the community to extend functionality, add themes, integrate LSPs, and customize workflows (like adding Vim Key Bindings support).

It would be even better if the editor shipped with a VS Code–like default theme, since the current one feels a bit outdated. Some inspiration for modern TUI theme can be taken from LunarVim, it's very beautiful for a Terminal based editor. From my personal experience in TUI design, it's mostly a matter of choosing the right colors which goes well with each other.

If theming were modular or JSON-based, users could even port existing VS Code themes over easily.

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🚀 Vision

Right now, this project mainly serves as a fun nostalgia piece — which is awesome!
But it also has tremendous potential to evolve into something much bigger.

For many of us from the newer generation (myself included), this is the first time hearing about MS-DOS Edit — so it doesn't even offer a nostalgia factor to us.
We grew up using tools like Atom, Sublime Text, and VS Code, so we naturally expect a similar level of usability and features.

With these improvements, Microsoft Edit could become a fantastic terminal-based editor for:

• Cloud Engineers
• Developers working on remote Headless Windows and Linux Systems
• Embedded Linux Developers
• Command-Line enthusiasts who prefer lightweight tools

It could even serve as a bridge between GUI-based and CLI-based development environments, giving users a consistent Microsoft editing experience everywhere — from desktop to remote servers.

For consistency, I would even suggest renaming the project to VS Edit to fit well into the Visual Studio ecosystem.

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🙏 Closing Thoughts

Thanks for considering these suggestions!
I’m really excited to see how this project evolves — it has the potential to become the go-to modern text editor for terminal users. 🤠

[lhecker]

I concur, but there are two issues with this: Building the foundation of an editor is way harder than building features later on top of that, and currently it is unlikely that Microsoft will fund me to spend half a year working purely on this project. So, I'll work on this whenever I can, which is not much.

[Mesum-Hussain]

Do you have full control over this project? I mean like are you the ultimate decision maker for this project?

Is this a Microsoft project or your personal one? No offense, Just curious.

Anyways, it's good that you agree with me here.

You know what, I am just starting out with open source contributions. Planning to take part in GSoC 2026. I will try to contribute as much as possible to this project. I guess a minimal lightweight TUI project would be a good first project to get into open source.

I was planning to learn Rust anyway for Embedded Programming, I guess this is a great opportunity to get started.

Let's turn this into VS Edit ASAP! 🤠

[lhecker]

Do you have full control over this project? I mean like are you the ultimate decision maker for this project?

Yes and yes.

Is this a Microsoft project or your personal one? No offense, Just curious.

Microsoft, but also a bit personal.

You know what, I am just starting out with open source contributions. Planning to take part in GSoC 2026. I will try to contribute as much as possible to this project. I guess a minimal lightweight TUI project would be a good first project to get into open source.

This is very exciting to hear! I do have to say though that this project's code is not particularly trivial. Due to lack of time, I wasn't able to thoroughly document it. It's also written in a way that maximizes performance and a compact size, which comes at the cost of a bit uglier code. If you'd still like to contribute, I'm happy to review your changes whenever I can.

[Mesum-Hussain]

I do have to say though that this project's code is not particularly trivial. Due to lack of time, I wasn't able to thoroughly document it. It's also written in a way that maximizes performance and a compact size, which comes at the cost of a bit uglier code. If you'd still like to contribute, I'm happy to review your changes whenever I can.

No issues. I will try my best to understand it using ChatGPT. Besides I think diving head first into a good project is the best way to learn any language, given the fact that I am trying to learn Rust for Systems Programming.

But I might submit a lot of code generated by AI for now, for creating basic structure of the code, and mainly because of the fact that I am literally learning Rust while working on this project.

So I guess you might need to do some thorough code review..... Hope that's fine with you.

I will start with solving issues asap.