Edit a text file on the console using Powershell

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

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 2

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.

Answer 3

While risking you punching me, I guess you are stuck with the solution you mentioned. Have a look at this posting on SuperUser:

Which are the non-x text editors in Powershell?

Also, there is a nano version for windows:

Nano Editor

I'll duck and cover now, hopefully someone will have a more sufficient answer.

Answer 4

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 5

I agree with Sven Plath. Nano is a great alternative. If you have Chocolatey or scoop, you can install nano by typing the following in Powershell:

PS C:\dev\> choco install nano
# --OR--
PS C:\dev\> scoop install nano

Then, to edit somefile.txt enter:

PS C:\dev\> nano somefile.txt

It's pretty neat!

Edit: Nano works well on my Windows 10 box but takes incredibly long to load the first time on my Windows 7 machine. That made me switch to vim (vi) on my Win 7 laptop

PS C:\dev\> choco install vim
PS C:\dev\> vim $profile

Add a line in the powershell profile to Set-Alias (sal)

sal vi vim

Esc - : - x - Enter :-)

Answer 6

If you use Windows container and you want change any file, you can get and use Vim in Powershell console easily.

To shelled to the Windows Docker container with PowerShell:

docker exec -it <name> powershell

• First get Chocolatey package manager

  Invoke-WebRequest https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | Invoke-Expression;

• Install Vim

  choco install vim

• Refresh ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLE You can just exit and shell back to the container

• Go to file location and Vim it vim file.txt

Answer 7

You could install Far Manager (a great OFM, by the way) and call its editor like that:

Far /e filename.txt

Answer 8

You can install nano in powershell via choco - It's a low friction way to get text editing capabilities into powershell:

1. Install Choco

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

2. Install Nano

choco install nano

3. Profit

nano myfile.txt

Best part is it becomes part of the path, and stays working across reboots etc :)

Answer 9

install vim from online, and then you can just do: vim "filename" to edit that file

Answer 10

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

notepad myfile.extension

It should open in notepad.

Answer 11

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 12

Not sure if this will benefit anybody, but if you are using Azure CloudShell PowerShell you can just type:

code file.txt

And Visual Studio code will popup with the file to be edit, pretty great.

Answer 13

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 14

I had to do some debugging on a Windows Nano docker image and needed to edit the content of a file, who would have guessed it was so difficult.

I used a combination of Get-Content and Set-Content and base 64 encoding/decoding to update files. For instance

Editing foo.txt

PS C:\app> Set-Content foo.txt "Hello World"                                                                                                                                                                                        
PS C:\app> Get-Content foo.txt                                                                                                                                                                                                      
Hello World                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
PS C:\app> [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString([System.Convert]::FromBase64String("TXkgbmV3IG11bHRpDQpsaW5lIGRvY3VtZW50DQp3aXRoIGFsbCBraW5kcyBvZiBmdW4gc3R1ZmYNCiFAIyVeJSQmXiYoJiopIUAjIw0KLi4ud29ybGQ=")) | Set-Content foo.txt 
PS C:\app> Get-Content foo.txt                                                                                                                                                                                                      
My new multi                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
line document                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
with all kinds of fun stuff                                                                                                                                                                                                         
!@#%^%$&^&(&*)!@##                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
...world                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
PS C:\app>       

The trick is piping the base 64 decoded string to Set-Content

[System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString([System.Convert]::FromBase64String("...")) | Set-Content foo.txt 

Its no vim but I can update files, for what its worth.

Answer 15

In linux i'm a fun of Nano or vim, i used to use nano and now vim, and they are really good choices. There is a version for windows. Here is the link https://nano-editor.org/dist/win32-support/

However more often we need to open the file in question, from the command line as quick as possible, to not loose time. We can use notepad.exe, we can use notepad++, and yea, we can use sublim text. I think there is no greater then a lightweight, Too powerful editor. Sublime text here. for the thing, we just don't want to get out of the command line, or we want to use the command line to be fast. and yea. We can use sublime text for that. it contain a command line that let you quickly open a file in sublime text. Also there is different options arguments you can make use of. Here how you do it.

First you need to know that there is subl.exe. a command line interface for sublim.

1-> first we create a batch file. the content is

@ECHO OFF

"C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3\subl.exe" %*

We can save that wherever we want. I preferred to create a directory on sublime text installation directory. And saved there the batch file we come to write and create.

(Remark: change the path above fallowing your installation).

2-> we add that folder to the path system environment variable. and that's it.

or from system config (windows 7/8/10)

then:

then:

then we copy the path:

then we add that to the path variable:

too quick!

launch a new cmd and now you've got subl command working well!

to open a file you need just to use subl command as fellow:

subl myfileToOpen.txt

you can also use one of the options arguments (type --help to see them as in the image above).

Also note that you can apply the same method with mostly any editor of your choice.

Answer 16

You can do the following:

bash -c "nano index.html"

The command above opens the index.html file with the nano editor within Powershell.

Alternatively, you can use the vim editor with the following command

bash -c "vi index.html"

Answer 17

If you have windows subsystem for linux (wsl), you will find the following command very useful:

bash -c "vi filename.txt"

Answer 18

Sadly powershell doesn't come with a built in console-text editor. You can redirect standard input for simple oneliners like so:

# write text and overwrite the file with that text
"my text that will appear in the file" > file.txt

For anything more complicated you will need a package manager Chocolatey

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

and install any of the following editors:

Nano

choco install nano

Issues

• Very laggy on windows
• Problems with arrow control

Vim

choco install vim

Issues

• No major issues just remember esc + :!qa will exit vim

Answer 19

You can set an alias for edit with your preferred editor.

Open shell profile

notepad $profile

Add the Set-Alias command

Set-Alias edit 'C:\Program Files\Sublime Text\subl.exe'

Then on a new shell

edit file.txt