Malcolm Smith

They could've just shipped YEdit, which is open source: http://www.malsmith.net/edit/ but there is NIH syndrome in MS.

So, this uses the DLL version of the Microsoft CRT. Don’t know if that counts as cheating :) Why is a CRT needed here anyway, beyond very basic stuff like startup code and memcpy?.. Is MiniCRT[1] an option? [1] http://www.malsmith.net/minicrt/

Yes, I would like to make a cross-platform editor one day. I would probably choose Pascal's RTL video unit over C for that task. There is one editor called YEDIT that fits the brief for windows systems: http://www.malsmith.net/edit/

A Microsoft employee recently (~6 months) opened a Github issue to discuss a command line editor for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440 > "Thank you so much to everyone for engaging with this feature exploration! Your passion has generated a ton of excitement in our own team, and I’m happy to share our proposed direction, which is that we will work with Malcolm Smith (malxau), the maintainer of Yedit, to ship Edit in Windows! We plan to do this by forking the Yedit code to a new OSS repo on GitHub, under Microsoft (like terminal or powertoys)." YEdit being an MIT licensed open-source recreation of the MS-DOS 5 editor, by a Microsoft employee: http://www.malsmith.net/edit/

Here's an example showing how to patch a userspace binary: http://www.malsmith.net/blog/patching-closed-software/ Note: not my blog. (Edit: removed a probably unnecessary, and likely inaccurate, detail). Patching the kernel would involve a similar (but slightly more complicated) process.

Malcolm Smith's YEdit deserves mention here, also inspired by the old MS-DOS Edit which was used by so many people in yesteryears to edit their autoexec files, read .nfo files and poke into the numerous batch files of the day. MS-DOS Edit no longer runs natively outside of something like a DOSBox, but YEdit is the closest thing I have seen to recreating almost exactingly the old nostalgic experience. Tilde is of course more for the non-Windows audience while YEdit is only for Windows. http://www.malsmith.net/edit/ MIT licensed source: https://github.com/malxau/yori/tree/master/edit

Thankfully, the author of Yori[0] shell has made a modern port of EDIT called, well, Yedit[1]. [0]: http://www.malsmith.net/yori/ [1]: https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2021/03/03/yedit-the-missing-edit-c…

It sounds like you're asking for two different things here: cmd.exe is a shell, and that's the guy that's parked. conhost.exe is a terminal, and that's under active development, though it's slower than something like VsCode, because we can't just go adding features as we see fit, we have a LOT of back compat we still need to support. Fortunately, conpty will allow for the creation of new terminal applications on Windows. If you're looking for a better shell experience on windows, I can point you to powershell or even [yori](http://www.malsmith.net/yori/), which looks pretty cool

I'm also a fan of the TUI from Qbasic, it also appeared in Microsoft Works for DOS, Microsoft Word for DOS and probably other places. The UI was refered to as COW character oriented windows. It would be good if it could be open sourced, for historical reference. There were other interesting TUIs, the one in Defrag in DOS, and the Antivirus would change characters on the fly to generate a mouse cursor. The TUI in DOSSHELL.exe would use customise some characters to draw icons. Maybe Scott Hanselman could be persuaded to work on open sourcing all the COW apps. (Honarable mention for EDIT in DOS7, which appears to be a rewrite, supporting long filenames). In the modern era, there is YEdit from the author of YCmd, which implements a similar looking UI, in Windows http://www.malsmith.net/edit/ Some other TUIs of note included the ones in Wordperfect, Norton Utilities, and of course TurboVision (though the last has implementations in modern environments).

You may give YEdit a try. http://www.malsmith.net/edit/

There's Yori http://www.malsmith.net/yori/