A-word-on-text-editors.md

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The text file editors that come with Windows, “edit” and “notepad”, are unsuitable for editing files in an MSYS environment for many reasons, but above all because they can’t handle Unix line endings. So it’s imperative you install a Unix-capable text editor such as Nano or Vim.

Nano is an easy-to-use editor designed for less experienced users. It’s available here as a precompiled Windows binary. Just extract nano.exe and cygwin1.dll from the archive and copy them to C:\windows or some other location on your execution path.

A better choice for more advanced users is Vim, a full-featured editor with syntax highlighting capability. A Windows installer for the gui-enabled Vim can be found here. This version is much more complete than the one included in the MinGW-64 team’s MSYS installation. For help with basic Vim commands, consult the Vim primer.

After installing Vim, you should add its executable path C:\Program Files\Vim\vim80 (this may be different for your version) to your PATH variable. Editing user paths is explained here.