The fast and lightweight text editor for MS-DOS 'VZ Editor' is now open source and available on GitHub

VZ Editor, a popular text editor for MS-DOS, has been made open source 30 years after its last update, and the source code and image files have been made public on GitHub.

GitHub - vcraftjp/VZEditor: MS-DOS Text Editor

#VZEditor has been released on GitHub! If you have any comments, please let me know in this reply. Once again, I would like to express my deep gratitude to @yyhayami of ZOB, who introduced me to Nakamura-san of VC, and to all the survivors of Nikkei MIX (lol) who provided us with a great deal of help during development. I hope you all live a long life! lol https://t.co/2URgnbFZP6

— c.mos (@c_mos) November 26, 2024

VZ Editor was released in 1989 by software retailer Village Center, as an improved version of EZ Editor, which was released in 1987 by programmer Yoshihiko Hyodo (c.mos, @c_mos in X) for the PC-9800 series. One of its features was its price of 9,800 yen, which was an exceptional price for a high-function text editor at the time, and it made inroads into the stronghold of MIFES, the king of domestic text editors.

However, while MIFES was compatible with Windows, VZ Editor was not compatible with Windows and updates stopped after version 1.6, released in 1994.

Thirty years later, the source code for the final version, 'VZ Editor version 1.6,' has been made public on GitHub. Mr. Hyodo expressed his gratitude to Mr. Mitsuru Nakamura (vc), the president of Village Center, for agreeing to the release.

Available on GitHub are the master discs for the PC-9800 and J-3100 versions, the master discs for the DOS/V, AX, PS/55 and US versions, as well as manuals from that time, FD image files for emulators, and the 'Fun Programming' article that was serialized in PC Power magazine at the time.

As explained on the GitHub page, you can launch VZ Editor by mounting the FD image file with the DOS emulator 'DOSVAXJ3.'

The manual and 'Fun Programming' are Markdown format files and can be viewed using Notepad or any text editor.

Many macros have been created for VZ Editor by volunteer users, and although they have not been published because the authors cannot be contacted, a 'Macros' folder has been prepared for publishing them at a later date.