Why is the edit command missing in Windows?

Updated: 03/06/2020 by Computer Hope
Windows DOS command prompt window

The 64-bit versions of Windows do not support the edit command in the Windows command line. If you need to edit files from the command line, we suggest using the notepad command from the command line as shown in the example below.

notepad hope.txt

Running the above command would edit the hope.txt file if it exists or create a new file called hope.txt in notepad. Once the file is saved, that file is created in your current directory.

Tip

Using the start command, you can also start another text editor with any file. For example, start hope.txt would open hope.txt in the default text editor.