Microsoft Edit is the Command Prompt editor you've been waiting for.

If you're an MS-DOS fan from the 90s, you'll love Microsoft Edit – a fully open source command-line interface (CLI) editor. Microsoft Edit fills a specific need for a default CLI editor in 64-bit Windows. At just 250KB, it's incredibly lightweight, allowing you to edit text files in Command Prompt or PowerShell while providing model-agnostic editing and scripting support.

 

Install Microsoft Edit

There are two ways to install Microsoft Edit, using the Github source file or via winget in PowerShell. It supports both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

GitHub

Go to the official Microsoft Edit GitHub repository page . Download the ZIP file to your PC and extract its folders.

 

From the extracted inner folder, you can run the application with admin rights with just a right click.

 

You can also launch the Edit application, seen as "edit.exe" from the search menu. It's always better to choose Run as administrator .

To get the full benefits of Edit's features, it's best to install the full application as shown below.

Winget

Open a PowerShell window in admin mode . Type the following command, then press Y to agree to all the terms of the source agreement.

winget install Microsoft.Edit

 

As you play around with Microsoft Edit, you'll discover many useful features and uses. Unlike the previous MS-DOS Editor, which only supported 16-bit applications, the new Edit is fully extensible with the future 64-bit Windows 11.

Extremely simple Windows command line editor

As a Windows developer, you will find Microsoft Edit to be an ideal tool for your needs. It strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality, allowing you to modify the code behind software applications without having to memorize complex commands and steps.

Completely open source, Microsoft Edit has gained a lot of traction due to its overall simplicity with a clean green screen interface. Only 4 buttons represent its minimalist design, with File, Edit and View containing everything you need.

Like Notepad, the Edit button in this app supports all the common keyboard shortcuts, such as Ctrl + S to save a text file, along with shortcuts like Ctrl + Z, Ctrl + Y, Ctrl + F to find files, Ctrl + R to replace, and Ctrl + A to select all. Of course, cut, copy, and paste shortcuts are also available.

 

However, unlike Notepad which is a GUI editor, you can access these commands in a CLI interface, which is ideal for developers.

Because the core Edit application file is less than 250KB in size, opening the file takes a fraction of a second compared to the processes of other console-based applications.

Using Edit in Command Prompt and PowerShell

A big reason to use winget to install Edit is that it adds itself as a command-line alias, supporting all existing consoles in Windows, including Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Windows Terminal.

Once the alias is added, all you have to do is type edit or edit.exe in any command-line interpreter, such as Command Prompt, PowerShell, or Windows Terminal. Edit integrates with all of these environments to edit text files, in addition to their command-executing capabilities.

 

Note that Edit does not execute any commands by itself, so you cannot use it to run system commands like ipconfig . However, you can use it to write any PowerShell script, with PS1 files.

Create and edit batch files

Edit serves as a replacement for many of Notepad's text editing functions, most notably the ability to edit batch scripts, although it cannot create them.

Open Command Prompt and use cd to put yourself in the path of the file where you store some BAT scripts. Here, for example, there is a script named "Myscript" stored in the C:Files folder path . Now, all you have to do is use cd to go to the correct folder location and enter the following command:

edit "Batch file script name".bat

Before Microsoft Edit, editing batch scripts directly in a command-line interpreter like PowerShell or Command Prompt was cumbersome and challenging. You had to use a third-party editor like Vim or leave the interpreter and open Notepad or Visual Studio Code . This frequent window switching disrupted the workflow of most developers.

Manual file management is also a pain. Remember all that 'echo on' and 'echo off' just to move files around within your own system. All that is now a thing of the past, as the Edit app launches directly into the folder path of your choice.