Edit a text file on the console using Powershell

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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

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

Far /e filename.txt

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 :)

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

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

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

notepad myfile.extension

It should open in notepad.

From PowerShell, there's also an in-process, PowerShell-language-aware option in the form of the Show-PSEditor cmdlet, aliased to psedit, from third-party module psedit, installable via, e.g.,
Install-Module -Scope CurrentUser psedit

Per the linked repo, it features:

• IntelliSense
• Syntax Highlighting
• Format on Save
• Script Execution
• Error View
• Syntax Error View

Caveat:

• As of this writing, the version published in the PowerShell Gallery has some problems that have since been fixed in the GitHub repo, but aren't published yet.

• It is possible to obtain the latest version directly from the repo, but you'd need to compile it yourself.

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.

Note: This is nowhere near as sophisticated as a terminal text editor like nano or vim, but it's native to PowerShell.

If you want to be able to do some basic file tasks such as adding new lines or reading the contents, PowerShell has the following options:

• Get-Content,
• Add-Content, and
• Set-Content

Get-Content reads the contents of the file and returns it to the PowerShell terminal. Add-Content appends a new line the file, preserving existing information. Set-Content replaces the contents of the file.

If you use

Add-Content -Path "Path/To/File"

it will return

cmdlet Add-Content at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:
Value[0]: 

and you can enter whatever information you want on that line. You can keep adding new lines as long as you don't submit an empty line. To "save and exit", press enter twice (to submit a blank line).

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.

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

bash -c "vi filename.txt"

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.

You can use winget to install it: winget install GNU.Nano

Also, If you have Git installed you already have it and you just have to add it to the path:

$PATH = [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH")

$nanoPath = "C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin"

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", "$PATH;$nanoPath")

nano test.txt

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

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.

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"

Best solution IMHO is to use Start <your editor application> <file to edit>.

For example, if you want to edit file.txt in your current folder with Notepad++, you'll run:

Start Notepad++ .\file.txt

Or for using Notepad just replace "Notepad++" with "Notepad". It works with "Sublime Text" or any other installed editor. Only caveat is that you need to use the app name as installed on your machine.

If you have GIT for Windows, then you have nano (and vim also). I have this in my Powershell_Profile.ps1

# Git has been installed on multiple machines with different paths
# This function returns the correct path...
function Get-GitPath {
  $gitPath = ''
  $p = (
    "$env:ProgramFiles\Git",
    "$env:SCOOP\apps\git\current"
  ) 
  foreach ($d in $p) {
    if ( Test-Path $d  ) {
      $gitPath = $d
      break
    }
  }
  $gitPath
}

# Start nano with arguments...
function Start-Nano {
  $nanoPath = "$(Get-GitPath)\usr\bin\nano.exe"
  if (-not (Test-Path $nanoPath)) {
    Write-Error "nano not found"
  }
  $nanoargs = @(
  )
  $nanoargs = $nanoargs + $args
  & $nanoPath @nanoargs
}

# The same applies to Vim; perhaps someone might find it useful. ;)
function Start-Vim {
    $gitPath = Get-GitPath
  $vimPath = "$gitPath\usr\bin\vim.exe"
  if (-not (Test-Path $vimPath)) {
    Write-Error "vim not found"
  }
  $vimargs = @(
    "-u",
    "$gitPath\etc\vimrc"
        )
  $vimargs = $vimargs + $args
  & $vimPath @vimargs
}

# the alias will be set only if git exists...
if (Get-Command git -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) {
  Set-Alias -Name nano -Value Start-Nano 
  Set-Alias -Name vim -Value Start-Vim 
}