With Bazzite v44.20260928, they replaced vim with ms-edit as the default editor:
“feat: Use msedit as the default editor over vim. This change is being made because it’s far friendlier on desktop and still usable on handhelds unlike nano.”
According to ms-edit’s Help > About, it’s v1.2.1.
I’m just a normal guy, so the replacement of vim seems like a really good idea for Bazzite.
EDIT: Actually, I’m not sure if “replaced” is the correct term. Yes, msedit is now the default:
echo $EDITOR /usr/bin/msedit
but vim is still present on the system. And since I can’t seem to find a generic way of invoking the default editor in the terminal (besides typing the cumbersome “$EDITOR”), I’m not sure if it makes any difference. If someone want to use vim, they’ll continue invoking the editor with “vim”. Otherwise, they’ll start invoking the editor with “msedit”.
Is there some way to find all the editors on the system? I believe in Debian-based systems, “select-editor” would list them all. But, that doesn’t work in Bazzite. Is there a reasonable command to invoke the default (like “edit”) or does that have to be set up as an alias somewhere?
I’m glad it’s finally being officially announced. I was worried I had a virus on my computer. I don’t really understand why they chose Microsoft. After all, there’s a reason we chose a Linux OS.
Well, the mere existence of Microsoft is not necessarily evil. After all, Bazzite is hosted on Github, which Microsoft owns. And, Kyle Gospodnetich (Creator of Bazzite and Maintainer @ ublue) is a/the “Linux Community Engineer @ microsoft”. And, Kyle’s, essentially, a programming god:
And, Microsoft open-sourced ms-edit back in 2025:
So, if anything nefarious appears in the code, people like Kyle can catch it and react.
I do wonder why Bazzite is using ms-edit v. 1.2.1 instead of the latest v 2.0.0. I assume that the bells-and-whistles they added in v2 weren’t necessary for Bazzite’s use-case and would just increase any attack surfaces (a la whatever Microsoft did to Notepad earlier this year).
Thanks for the detailed explanation, but it is still a little strange that a Microsoft app suddenly appeared on my desktop. Calling a programmer a “god” is really strange—maybe you should see a doctor after all.
There are plenty of Linux programs that do the same things as MSEdit. Why didn’t they choose Gedit or Kate?
GitHub was bought by Microsoft because they want to have a hand in everything. So soon we’ll all be going back to Windows because we can’t live without their apps?
… and there is even a nice, non M$, Linux friendly alternative - mcedit… with mouse support and menus and everything… and you even get the dual panel file manage for free
Nice catch! In my particular case, I had already replaced the default EDITOR with nvim, so I just needed to get rid of msedit. Might cleanup the environment file though. Thanks!
It can be done at either stage, really. If your base image is bazzite, then you’ll be removing the package either way, but at build level you do it with dnf remove, while after the build is active, you need to use rpm-ostree uninstall instead. I usually do not use the second one though.
