cmd window 'edit' for Windows 7 x64 - how?

G

gibber

Gawd
Joined
Jul 16, 2007
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Doh! If you type "edit" in the command prompt on a Windows x64 system you get an unpleasant surprise! It's NOT THERE! :confused:

So... What are the best alternative editors that will run in command line mode for Windows 7 x64?

:)
 
vim. Really, though, why do you need a command-line editor? Running "notepad filename" works jsut as well as "edit filename"
 
What if you're booted to command prompt only? Or maybe connected to your system through SSH (I don't have an SSH server setup at the moment, but I could see doing that).

I like to use command windows on Windows systems and terminal windows on UNIX/Linux systems - it's just natural for me to type edit. Not that I can't use Notepad++ in a GUI or Wordpad, or UltraEdit, or etc. etc. But I've been typing "edit" for so many years, why couldn't they just keep having a program called "edit" for the 64 bit version of Windows 7?

It's upsetting to have to find, or maybe even compile, some other text console editing program in order to be able to be able to have that functionality... I suppose the easiest short term fix would be to copy notepad to a file named edit.exe and put it in the path.
 
gibber said:
<snip> But I've been typing "edit" for so many years, why couldn't they just keep having a program called "edit" for the 64 bit version of Windows 7?

<snip>.
Click to expand...

The reason EDIT is gone is because it's a 16-bit program, and windows 64-bit can't run 16-bit programs.

Also, there's no "command prompt only" for NT base Windows (as someone already said). When you select option, you get safe mode OS with cmd.exe replacing explorer.exe as the startup shell. So there's no reason you can't load Notepad.exe while booted into that mode.
 
Thanks Vashypoo, I'd forgotten about free UNIX tools ported over to Windows....

And to those saying "no ssh on Windows" - I don't buy that for one second.
 
There is no native SSH on Windows. Cygwin and winsshd are not native. If you want the same functionality (better, IMO), use PowerShell 2.0 and remoting.
 
Knowing a bit about the internals of cygwin and knowing that dos edit was a dos app that accessed (possiblly emulated) screen memory directly I think it is very unlikely dos edit would work with cygwin sshd even on a 32-bit OS. If you want to use cygwin sshd to edit files then you will almost certainly have to use cygwin editors.

I haven't used winsshd so I can't comment on that.
 
My posting is most likly a day late and a dollar short, but if you have the option to use XP mode then the edit cmd is available.
 
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