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GitHub - Edit

It's 2025, and I'm excited about a new CLI text editor. When I need a text editor in a shell, I always reach for vim, but I don't love it. It's there when I need it and serves its purpose, but I've never gotten over the weird key binding knowledge required just to exit and save a file.

What I like about Edit is that it's built as a TUI (Terminal User Interface) which means you can use your mouse (point and click), you can use ctrl+a to select all text, you can use ctrl+c and ctrl+v for copy paste, and it's just way more intuitive to use.

Getting it to run

The tool was just released, so as expected, there are some quirks. First and foremost, Windows Defenders think the pre-built binary the released is a virus! In order to actually play with it, I had to build it from source using the rust tool chain.

Here's what I had to do:

Install the C++ toolchain using Visual Studio Installer.
Restart my shell, to update paths.
Install the rust toolchain
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/edit.git
rustup install nightly
rustup default nightly-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc (to set the nightly toolchain as the default)
rustup component add rust-src --toolchain nightly-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc (no idea why I had to do this, but rustup said I had to)
cargo build --config .cargo/release.toml --release (compile and linking step)
cp .\target\release\edit.exe D:\tools\ (D:\tools is where I store my adhoc tools that I build or maintain)

A few of these steps were documented on the Edit README.md file, but several were missing.

MarkItDown - GitHub

I just learned about a new open-source tool from Microsoft called MarkItDown.

MarkItDown is a lightweight Python utility for converting various files to Markdown for use with LLMs and related text analysis pipelines.

This seems similar to pandoc, but instead of any being able to take any formatted document type and convert it to any other type, it only outputs to markdown. It can be used as a standalone CLI tool or as a python library.

I'm particularly interested in converting HTML to markdown, so that I can take public documentation online and convert it into a markdown file, which can be more effectively consumed by LLMs. I was playing around with this idea last week during a hackathon, where I wanted to take the query language specification for WIQL that is online and turn it into a compact prompt, so the LLM can more reliably create WIQL queries for me.

To get the HTML for the web page, I use Simon Willison's tool shot-scraper to dump the HTML of the webpage, then pipe it into markitdown

shot-scraper html https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/queries/wiql-syntax | markitdown > wiql.md

This produces a file called wiql.md (link to gist with unmodified output). It's certainly not perfect, the first 300 lines (out of around 1000), are not related to the documentation, and is just extra HTML that isn't needed. This could probably be mitigated by passing an element selector to shot-scraper, so it doesn't dump the unrelated HTML of the page. But it's not hard to delete those lines manually, and then the final result is pretty good. It looks fairly similar to the original web page.

edit: Here is the one-liner to only dump the relevant part of the page.. You have to wrap the output of shot-scraper in a <html> so markitdown can infer the input type.

echo "<html>$(shot-scraper html https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/queries/wiql-syntax -s .content)</html>" | markitdown -o wiql.md

MarkItDown also supports plugins, so you can extend it to support other file formats. I've only played around with this a little bit, but I think it will be handy to have a quick and easy way to convert more documents to markdown. I'm particularly interested in the pdf and docx input types as well.

Tag: microsoft

Edit - a Windows-native CLI text editor

Creating a markdown file from Microsoft Learn docs