I use Windows 10 and an .exe program (in-house code written by a colleague) that imports data from .txt files. Since 99% of my use of .txt files are for this program, I've changed the default Windows program so that this .exe file is run automatically when opening a .txt file. If I need to access the .txt file directly, or use it for another purpose, I right-click and choose "edit."
I'm now writing a program of my own (using Octave 4.4.1), which also uses .txt files that sometimes need to be opened/edited, but if I use "open(filename)" in my Octave script, of course it just opens the .exe file. I can open the .txt file from there, but I'd like to skip this middle step, since the aforementioned .exe program is not intended to be used in this process, and there are other users of my code that don't have the .exe program installed.
Is there a way to duplicate the right-click/edit feature in Windows within Octave code? "edit(filename)" opens the file in the native Octave editor, which is technically viable, but not exactly a desirable scenario. I've also tried changing the default Octave editor to Notepad, and I've tried Notepad++ as well, but I have had absolutely no luck, even with significant effort, of making Octave use an external default editor of any kind (even when I remove the .exe program as the default for .txt files). Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.
You can send command-line commands from Octave using the system() function.
For example, to open the file in notepad, you could do
[status, output] = system("notepad <path_to_text_file>.txt");
If notepad isn't in your system path, you will have to add it to or use the full path to the notepad executable
Or, if you want to use Notepad++, add it to your system path and then do
[status, output] = system("notepad++ <path_to_text_file>.txt");