Information about Edit (ms Dos)

edit, also known as MS-DOS Editor, is a text editor which comes with MS-DOS (since version 5) and Microsoft Windows. Originally (up to MS-DOS 6.22) it was just a short stub that started QBasic in editor mode. Since DOS 7 (Windows 95) QBasic was removed and the MS-DOS Editor became a standalone program. Although it kept the COM file extension for compatibility, it is actually an EXE.

edit.com is sometimes used as a substitute for Notepad on Windows 9x, where Notepad is limited to small files only. edit.com can edit files that are up to 65,279 lines and up to approximately 5MB in size (MS-DOS versions are limited to approximately 300–400KB, depending on how much conventional memory is free). edit can be launched by typing it into the RUN box on Windows, and by typing edit into the command line interface (usually cmd.exe).

Features

• Can edit up to 9 files at a time (Windows 9x versions only, DOS versions are limited to a single file at a time). The screen can be split vertically into 2 windows, each of which can display a different file.
• Customizable color scheme
• Files can be opened in "binary mode", where a fixed number of characters are displayed per line, and newlines are treated as any other character.
• UNIX newlines are converted to DOS newlines.
• text user interface
• Mouse support

Some of these features were added only in 1995 (version 2.0), with the release of Windows 95.

Limitations

• Outside of binary mode, tabs get converted to spaces, and UNIX newlines are converted to DOS newlines.
• Does not support Unicode.
• DOS versions (for MS-DOS 6.22 and older) lack proper support for binary files, multiple files and are limited to using only the first 640KB of RAM, like any other MS-DOS real mode program.
• Does not directly support USB printers, this can be fixed by adding it as a network printer though.

See also

• List of DOS commands