[pulkitsh1234]

Geniunely curious, how projects like these get approved in an org at the scale of Microsoft? Is this like a side project by some devs or part of some product roadmap? How did they convince the leadership to spend time on this?

[dark-star]

As they explained, they needed a text editor that works in a command line (for Windows Core server installs), works across SSH (because for a while now Windows included an SSH Server so you can completely manage it through SSH), and can be used by non-vi-experienced Windows administrators (i.e. a modeless editor).

[llarsson]

Telling people to use nano would of course have been next to impossible. Much easier to rewrite a DOS-era editor in Rust, naturally.

[zamalek]

A text editor is an obvious target for copilot integration.

[sublimefire]

Each group needs to do something and they come up with the ideas. Sometimes it is driven by various leaders, e.g. “use copilot”. Sometimes it is an idea from some hackerdayz event which gets expanded. Sometimes this is driven in research units where you have a bunch of technical people twiddling their thumbs. Sometimes this is an idea that goes through deep analysis and multiple semesters before it gets funding.

Look at the amount of contributors here. This project was probably some strategic investment. It did not come to existence overnight.