I Used MS-DOS Editor From 1992 for Writing, and It Didn't Go Well

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I Used MS-DOS Editor From 1992 for Writing, and It Didn’t Go Well

Some text editors and word processors have stood the test of time, thanks to unique features, nostalgia from the original users, or some combination of both. I wanted to try revisiting some of those editors, and for my first experiment, I tried doing my job in the EDIT program from early–90s MS-DOS.

MS-DOS was the early operating system for IBM PC-compatible systems, before Windows fully took over the PC landscape. MS-DOS Editor was included the 1991 release of MS-DOS 5.0 as the new default text editor, based on the QBasic IDE. Microsoft continued bundling it in all versions of MS-DOS after that.

Funny enough, Editor outlived MS-DOS by several decades, just in a slightly different form. Microsoft made an updated version for the command line in Windows 95, known as EDIT.EXE. That was included in all 32-bit versions of Windows, all the way up to and including Windows 10.

Support for Windows 10 doesn’t end until October 2025, so by that point, EDIT will have stuck around for 34 years. The similarly-named Microsoft Edit is a spiritual successor, which runs natively on modern Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Setting Up Editor

My goal was to use MS-DOS Editor in my real work writing articles here at How-To Geek, so it needed to run on my main computer with shared file access. Thankfully, the DOSBox-X emulator made that a relatively easy process.

I installed DOSBox-X on my Mac, and set up a ‘DOS’ folder in my Documents directory to act as the emulated C: drive. I copied the EDIT.COM, QBASIC.EXE, and QBASIC.INI files from MS-DOS 6.22 installation disks to the directory, and then just typed “edit” in the DOSBox prompt to start it. Opening a file by adding the path after the command is an option, but Editor also has its own Open dialog with a file browser.

This setup allowed Editor to open and save any text files in the shared folder, so I could easily access my finished work. This isn’t a word processor with real text formatting options, so I had to write in Markdown format to use headers, links, and other important elements.

The last step is turning those Markdown text files into HTML format, so I could paste them into my work’s content management system (CMS) with all formatting intact. I wrote this terminal command that converts the file with Pandoc, then copies the result to my clipboard:

        cat "/Users/corbin/Documents/DOS/MAIN.TXT" | pandoc -f markdown -t html --ascii=true | pbcopy

With this integrated setup, I didn’t think using MS-DOS Editor would be drastically different than writing in any other plain text editor. I was wrong.

This Was a Bad Idea

MS-DOS Editor has a few features that stood out to me, like an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts, customizable text and background colors, and full mouse cursor support. There’s also no shoehorned AI integration—take that, Word. However, it’s definitely not a word processor. You never know what you have until it’s gone, and for me, that is a word counter and spellchecker.

I like the keyboard shortcuts for quickly jumping to the next line, or the start/end of the current line, but there’s no shortcut for saving the current file. I’m not really sure why that one is missing—even Microsoft’s own Word 5.x for DOS from around the same time has a save shortcut.

Editor also doesn’t support line wrapping, and each line is limited to 256 characters. That means you have to create new lines manually, either at the end of the 256-character limit, or near the end of the display size. I did the latter, which meant my text files had a fixed width of around 80 columns, and those line breaks appeared in the final exported HTML file. If my work’s CMS didn’t remove those line breaks automatically, that would be another step in the Markdown-to-HTML conversion process.

I did successfully write one article entirely in Editor, but that was the end of my short-lived experiment. The more utilitarian interface and plain text editing wasn’t much of a problem, and I could do spell checking after the draft was done, but all of that and no line wrap was incredibly annoying.

I want to try more legacy text editors and word processors, and my call for suggestions on Bluesky and Mastodon has given me plenty of potential ideas. MS-DOS Editor is just a bit too barebones, though.