Yes, the Windows 95 EDIT.COM replacement has no QBASIC code in it. It was written (actually in about 3 months) by a college student and licensed to Microsoft. It’s an EXE, not a COM, written in C and x86 assembly, and then run through a compression tool that reduced the exe size on disk by about 30% or so. When it runs, the bootstrap code decompresses the binary into memory. Because of that, if you’re trying to trace through it, you’ll see some strange things going on at startup.
It took advantage of long filenames on Win95, but would actually run just fine on older MS-DOS back to DOS 2.x or so. The only caveat was it has some 80186 opcodes in it to save space, so it won’t run on an 8088.

In Chicago Build 89e, EDIT.COM is replaced with “Chicago Emergency Editor” 0.5, which is renamed to “MS-DOS Editor” in version 0.9. And from binary level look, it shares very little with old QBASIC.

Sorry, but I believe you’re at least partially wrong, I remember the first time I sat on a *nix computer in the 90s, I think it was SUSE, in any case, I open some file with nano as instructed, and the teacher went away for a moment on a phone call, and within seconds I was able to edit what I needed (a simple ls or something, I don’t remember exactly), save it and close it, because the instructions to do so where there on the screen, funny enough, the very next exercise was to do the same with vi, or vim, don’t remember, so the teacher just stood there for a solid 10 minutes watching us noobs trying to find out way around something so simple, save and quit, and from a class of about 20, do you want to know how many of us could do it? None, not a single one of us figured it out.
I understand that for people used to it is great, I truly do, a good tool is an extension of you with enough time using it, but vi is from an era where programmers had to be aware of every bit, because resources were so scarce, that has no longer been the case for ages except very niche applications, forcing it as default for newcomers is just another way of gatekeeping, kudos to fedora for at the very least not making it default, and allowing the user to choose it…
Peace

perhaps install yori with ysetup, then you can get yedit.exe from the path where it was installed

Stu,
I think Microsoft DEFINITELY intended to replace edlin.com with edit. If you’ve ever used it and you think gwbasic is archaic whoo buddy.

If you want edit.com in linux then install “mc” or Midnight Commander, it’s a Norton Commander knockoff but it supports an editor mode by launching it as “nc -E” and optionally a filename. Really good for certain kinds of editing.