this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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[โ€“] dsilverz@calckey.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world @programmer_humor@programming.dev

Good question. I'm not sure. I guess no, because, as far as I know, ed is a GNU editor which allows for composing and editing files in a REPL-like environment (whose specific commands, apart from "q" to quit, I'm yet to learn)

The "edit" I'm referring to was a spiritual antecessor or cousin of vim, emacs and nano. It was a TUI, full with a functional menubar accessible through keyboard arrow keys. I remember it having a blue background with gray/white text.

I remember with quite a certainty it was a thing for Windows XP. Was invokeable by using "edit filename.txt" in cmd.

However, I also remember having manually copied some executables across diferent Windows versions in order to test and see whether these old executables would work. I remember having successfully ran Windows XP's calc.exe in some later Windows version, relying on the compatibility layer ("ntvdm", I guess?). I remember doing the same for 16-bit, MS-DOS programs, but I don't remember whether "edit" MS-DOS programs was included in post-XP Windows versions, or if I manually copied it from XP.

Maybe it's edit I'm remembering. It was a long time ago, and I stopped using windows seriously around 3.11, so I never paid much attention to what was on that partition. It was only there to run steam (and a few other games).

I suppose I should have switched to a console, but it never even occurred to me at the time.