Edit a text file on the console in 64-bit Windows

Question

I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to edit text files in the console (PowerShell in my case). I'm using Windows 7 64 bit. It galls me that I can't just type edit filename.txt to edit a file. That used to work, but that's all changed. What are my options to view and edit text files within the windows console, and if you tell me to install and learn VIM I'm going to punch you in the face. :-)

Answer 1

I am a retired engineer who grew up with DOS, Fortran, IBM360, etc. in the 60's and like others on this blog I sorely miss the loss of a command line editor in 64-bit Windows. After spending a week browsing the internet and testing editors, I wanted to share my best solution: Notepad++. It's a far cry from DOS EDIT, but there are some side benefits. It is unfortunately a screen editor, requires a mouse, and is consequently slow. On the other hand it is a decent Fortran source editor and has row and column numbers displayed. It can keep multiple tabs for files being edited and even remembers where the cursor was last. I of course keep typing keyboard codes (50 years of habit) but surprisingly at least some of them work. Maybe not a documented feature. I renamed the editor to EDIT.EXE, set up a path to it, and invoke it from command line. It's not too bad. I'm living with it. BTW be careful not to use the tab key in Fortran source. Puts an ASCII 6 in the text. It's invisible and gFortran, at least, can't deal with it. Notepad++ probably has a lot of features that I don't have time to mess with.

Answer 2

Why not use notepad?

notepad.exe filename.txt

The old edit.com works in PowerShell (at least on my box: Windows 7 Pro x86) but in x64 it doesn't work due to its 16bit architecture.

You can take a look at this easy editor.

Answer 3

Bit of a resurrect but for anyone else coming to this question, take a look at the Micro editor. It's a small standalone EXE with no dependencies and with native Windows 32\64 versions. Works well in both PowerShell and CMD.EXE.

Answer 4

Well there are thousand ways to edit a Text file on windows 7. Usually people Install Sublime , Atom and Notepad++ as an editor. For command line , I think the Basic Edit command (by the way which does not work on 64 bit computers) is good;Alternatively I find type con > filename as a very Applaudable method.If windows is newly installed and One wants to avoid Notepad. This might be it!! The perfect usage of Type as an editor :)

reference of the Image:- https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/34280/How-to-Write-Applet-Code

Answer 5

I'm thinking you could just use notepad, like this:

notepad myfile.extension

It should open in notepad.

Answer 6

Kinesics Text Editor.

It's super fast and handles large text files, though minimal in features. There's a GUI version and console version (k.exe) included. Should work the same on linux.

Example: In my test it took 7 seconds to open a 500mb disk image.