Installing vim-console on Windows 2022 from PowerShell

Working with Windows Containers has provided me tremendous education. Learning PowerShell has shown me how far the windows realm has come in the form of CLI management. It still seems to be lacking in a few areas, and I really don’t like the extremely verbose syntax nor the single dash arguments. But I digress. This post is about solving a single problem. The one problem with endless obtuse workarounds.

Problem

Editing text files…from a windows CLI (cmd.exe, PowerShell, etc).

Solution

Find the Microsoft equivalent of Vim. Is that Notepad.exe? Wordpad.exe? Get-Contents? Fail, Fail, Mostly-Fail

My Solution

Install vim-console; an extremely powerful text editor that has proven to be the staple of all *nix users around the world for decades.

Note: There are many articles similar to How to Edit Files with a Real PowerShell Text Editor that show how to use Chocolaty to install Vim, Emacs or Nano. However, most of my use cases don’t allow Chocolaty in their datacenters. So, we have to install vim the hard way.

Steps

SSH to your server.

Don’t know how to setup ssh on Windows? I will point you at their documentation: Getting Started OpenSSH for Windows
Verify you are in PowerShell.

Type the command powershell or pwsh and hit enter.

Look for the PS in front of your command prompt.

Download vim-console artifacts from NLUUG - dunno where I found this

wget https://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/vim/pc/vim90rt.zip -o vim90rt.zip
wget https://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/vim/pc/vim90w32.zip -o vim90w32.zip

Extract archives

expand-archive .\vim90w32.zip -DestinationPath .
expand-archive  -Force .\vim90rt.zip -DestinationPath .

Run installer
```
cd vim\vim90
.\install.exe
```
Change settings as needed and say d for do it.
Run and Profit
- Simply type vim and hit enter
- To exit, the key sequence Esc-:-q-<enter> will exit.

Conclusion

I didn’t go into a lot of detail but hopefully this helps with the steps for using VIM.

-Nate

Vim and Windows? YES!