[cosignal]

Yeah ... I don't think there's any overlap between "users largely unfamiliar with terminals" who want something easy to use, and 'Linux users who are sufficiently technical that they would even hear about this repo'.

[paulfharrison]

Here's a scenario. You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?

I've met biologists who enjoy the challenge of vim, but they are rare. nano does the job, but it's fugly. micro is a bit better, and my current recommendation. They are not perfect experiences out of the box. If Microsoft can make that out of the box experience better, something they are very good at, then more power to them. If you don't like Microsoft, make something similar.

[hulitu]

> You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?

mcedit ?

[0points]

> You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?

Wrongly phrased scenario. If you are running this cluster for the biologists, you should build a front end for them to "edit SLURM scripts", or you may find yourself looking for a new job.

> A Bioinformatics Engineer develops software, algorithms, and databases to analyze biological data.

You're an engineer, so why don't you engineer a solution?

[zamadatix]

The title is a bit confusing depending how you read it. Edit isn't "for" Linux any more than PowerShell was made for Linux to displace bash, zsh, fish, and so on. Both are just also available with binaries "for" Linux.

The previous HN posts which linked to the blog post explaining the tool's background and reason for existing on Windows cover it all a lot better than a random title pointing to the repo.

[egorfine]

TIL PowerShell exists for Linux.

But.. why?

[0points]

It's a windows 11 terminal editor. Don't get confused by the fact that it also works on Linux.

[rtpg]

I dunno, I spent a lot of years (in high school at least) using Linux but being pretty overwhelmed by using something like vim (and having nobody around to point me to nano).

EDIT.COM, on the other hand... nice and straightforward in my book

[kevin_thibedeau]

There's no shortage of less technical people using nano for editing on Linux servers. Something even more approachable than that would have a user base.

[mikepurvis]

Especially noting it's a single binary that's just 222kb on x86_64— that's an excellent candidate to become an "installed by default" thing on base systems. Vim and emacs are both far too large for that, and even vim-tiny is 1.3MB, while being considerably more hostile to a non-technical user than even vim is.

I can definitely see msedit having a useful place.

[hulitu]

Midnight commander comes with mcedit.

[joseda-hg]

I dunno, I use edit since I've heard of it instead of figuring out why my vim config breaks on windows

I might use nano via wsl (Or at that point just nvim), but that also has it quirks

It occupies the same space as micro did for me, but it's / it will be preinstalled so it's better (Also a reason I even cared for vi at first)

[cAtte_]

well the editor was obviously designed primarily for Windows, not sure why the title says Linux