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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

This inspired me to have a try at running Edit on macOS via Docker - here's what I got working (should work for anyone else with Docker installed on Apple silicon too, I pushed the image to the GitHub Container Registry):

  docker run --platform linux/arm64 \
    -it --rm \
    -v $(pwd):/workspace \
    ghcr.io/simonw/alpine-edit

Run that in a directory to open Edit against the files in that directory.

More notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/21/edit-is-now-open-sourc... - and a new TIL on publishing to the GitHub Container Registry here: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/container-registry

You can also compile directly from source on macOS - instructions here, I've not tried this yet: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/blob/main/README.md#build-...

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For Apple's own `container`[1], just remove the `--platform linux/arm64` part, like this:

  container run -it --rm -v "$(pwd):/workspace" ghcr.io/simonw/alpine-edit

I did have to resize my terminal for this to work, but that could be a terminal emulator issue.

[1] https://github.com/apple/container

This was harder to quit than vim. ctrl-f didn't work and there's no alt on my keyboard; hard pass.

I don't understand. You don't have an option key, either?

Or are you not on a Mac, PC, or Chromebook?

On a macbook pro, option key just gave me a ƒ symbol, both in Terminal.app and Ghostty. Anyways, if that was meant to be alt and it requires setup to work, then it's not worth the effort.

Terminal.app has a setting "Use Option as Meta Key" that needs to be enabled. It's under the Edit menu as well as in Settings > Profiles > Keyboard (if you want, you can click use Command-A to select all the profiles to apply the change to all of them at once). Ghostty will have a similar option.

Also surprised you haven't encountered this earlier, given it affects all usage of Alt in the terminal.

Just wondering, why did you make an entire container image instead of trying to compile it from source first?

Mainly because I wanted an excuse to figure out how to package tools like this using Docker.

It also felt like a better way to distribute the tool for other people to use: I don't want to distribute a compiled binary (because in macOS you then need to sign it for other people to use it), but a Docker incantation skips that step.

Because now I can use their Docker image trivially. They can also trivially use their Docker container on multiple computers, multiple VMs, multiple VPSs. They can Docker Compose it into other Docker images they're setting up, too.

I'm definitely not a Docker expert, but I've become a huge fan.

I built it for macOS natively and it works like a charm!

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