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

Some text editors and text processing have resisted the time test, thanks to unique features, nostalgia for original users or a combination of the two. I wanted to try to review some of these publishers, and for my first experience, I tried to do my job in the Edit of MS-DOS program in the early 90s.

MS-DOS was the early operating system for IBM PC compatible systems, before Windows completely supported the PC landscape. The MS-DOS publisher was included in the 1991 version of MS-DOS 5.0 as a new default text editor, based on the Qbasic IDE. Microsoft continued to group it in all versions of MS-DOS after that.

Quite funny, the publisher survived MS-DOS for several decades, just in a slightly different form. Microsoft has made an update version for the command line of Windows 95, known as Edit.exe. This was included in all 32 -bit versions of Windows, up to Windows 10.

Windows 10 support does not end before October 2025, so at this stage, Edit will have been about 34 years. The Microsoft Edit, named similar, is a spiritual successor, which natively works on modern windows, Linux and MacOS.

Configuration of the editor

My goal was to use the MS-DOS publisher in my real work articles here to Geek.He therefore had to perform on my main computer with access to the shared file. Fortunately, the Dosbox-X emulator made this a relatively easy process.

I installed Dosbox-X on my Mac and configured a ‘back’ backrest in my directory of documents to act as the C: imitated reader. I copied the Edit.com,, Qbasic.exeAnd Qbasic.ini Files of the MS-DOS 6.22 installation discs to the directory, then simply type “modify” in the Dosbox prompt to start it. The opening of a file by adding the path after the command is an option, but the editor also has its own open dialog box with a file browser.

This configuration allowed the publisher to open and save all text files in the shared folder, so that I can easily access my finished work. It is not 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 to transform these Markdown text files into HTML format, so that I can stick them into a content management system (CMS) of my work with all intact formats. I wrote this terminal command which converts the file with Pandoc, then copy the result to my clipboard:

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

    

With this integrated configuration, I did not think that the use of the MS-DOS publisher would be radically different from writing in any other raw text editor. I was wrong.

It was a bad idea

The MS-DOS publisher has some features that are marked to me, such as a large list of keyboard shortcuts, customizable text and background colors and full management of the mouse cursor. There is also no integration of shoe AI – Take this word. However, it is Certainly not A word processor. You never know what you have gone until it is gone, and for me, it is a word counter and a spelling verifier.

I like keyboard shortcuts to jump quickly to the next line, or the start / end of the current line, but there is no shortcut to save the current file. I don’t really know why it is missing – even Microsoft 5.x’s own word for just at the same time, has a backup shortcut.

The publisher does not support line wrap, and each line is limited to 256 characters. This means that you need to create new lines manually, either at the end of the 256 character limit, or towards the end of the size of the screen. I did the latter, which meant that my text files had a fixed width of about 80 columns, and these line breaks appeared in the final HTML file. If the CMS of my work has not deleted these line breaks automatically, it would be another step in the Markdown-to-HTML conversion process.

I managed to write an article entirely in the publisher, but it was the end of my short -term experience. The most utilitarian interface and the publishing of raw text was not a problem, and I could make the spelling checks after the end of the project, but all this And No line envelope was incredibly boring.

I want to try more text editors and inherited text processing, and my call for suggestions on Bluesky and Mastodon gave me a lot of potential ideas. MS-DOS publisher is just little Too none, however.