If you are familiar with Linux or come from a Unix background, you probably know about Vim. For those of us that started and stay mostly in the realm of Windows however; I Let we exposed to vim editor in PowerShell, and see what it can do. Windows OS does not come with Vim as Unix-based systems do. 

Vim is a powerful, widely used text editor for Unix-based systems, including Linux and macOS. It is known for its speed, efficiency, and flexibility, making it a popular choice among programmers, system administrators, and other power users who need to edit text files on a regular basis. Vim is a command-line interface (CLI) application that can be used in a terminal window, and it provides a wide range of commands and keyboard shortcuts for navigating and editing text files.

Why we need this editor?

Did you run a script that read a text file and need to change something in config for debugging or found that the file had several wrong entries? A PowerShell text editor may come in handy in such situations. You wouldn’t need to fire up an external editor or not have permission to open the file directly. Instead, you can edit the file without leaving PowerShell. How cool is that?

You can also read : If you want to check if script is running in admin privileges,

How to use vim editor in PowerShell

To edit a text file using the Vim editor in PowerShell, follow below steps:

Install the Vim editor in PowerShell

STEP 1: Open PowerShell as an Administrator.

Open PowerShell by searching for “PowerShell” in the Start menu and selecting “Windows PowerShell” or “Windows PowerShell (x86)” in admin.

STEP 2: Install Vim editor in PowerShell using Chocolatey

In the PowerShell terminal, execute the following command to install the Vim editor.

choco install vim -y

STEP 3: To verify the Vim version, run the following command

vim –version

Editing and Saving a File using Vim

For this demo, I already having the txt file (in c:\mytestfile) where i am going to edit & save my changes. By following the above steps, now that you have Vim installed, it’s time to get you to learn to edit a file. Before you go any further, you should know that there are different modes in Vim. Each mode behaves differently and affects which actions you can do inside the editor.

The three commonly-used modes are:

• Normal – The default mode as soon as you open Vim. This mode allows you to navigate the text file but not add new texts.
• Insert – This mode is where Vim allows you to edit the file. To enter this mode, press i (case insensitive) on the keyboard. To exit and go back to the normal mode, press ESC.
• Command – In this mode, Vim lets you invoke commands such as save the file, quit Vim, or view the help document, among others.

STEP 4: Open a file using Vim Command

To open the file, run the vim command followed by the filename to open. The command below opens the mytestfile.txt file in the PowerShell console and its ready for view and edit . 

vim “c:\thiyagu disck\mytestfile.txt

STEP 5: Enable the Insert Mode for the file

Next, enter the insert mode by pressing “i”. As you enter the insert mode, the text — INSERT — appears at the bottom of the editor, as shown in the following image. Now that you are in insert mode edit the file as you wish. The arrow keys will let you move the cursor inside the editor.

For this example I added new line as highlighted in the yellow arrow.

STEP 6: Append changes & Save

After making the necessary changes to the text file, press Esc to return to normal mode and Type the command :wq and press Enter to save and close the file. The command w saves the files while q exits Vim.

Output: