PowerShell Config for Developers

As a Developer in the Microsoft Tech-Stack you may like to work with a powerful shell. On Windows there is the PowerShell 7 - but like nearly every other shell, the base config is not as usefull for development tasks as it could be. This post gives some ideas of how the UI/UX could get improved for those tasks.

Terminal

First of all the old CMD.exe should get retired on your Windows system! I could realy recommend the new Windows Terminal - even though it's in preview state. The newest version recieved one of my last missing features - the mouse support for visual input - now it has nearly all needed features to be a powerfull terminal for PowerShell, WSL and SSH use-cases. But you can use PowerShell 7 and this config also on MacOS and Linux if you want (makes sense in terms of e.g. Dot.Net-Core development, Azure Cloud config,...).

On MacOS I could recommend iTerm 2 on Linux Tilix and as Cross-Platform solution with some performance trade-offs Terminus.

Shell customizing

I use Git all the way for version control of my code, snippets, scripts, notes and documentation. My main Git tool is always a commandline Git. Because of that I like to see the Git status always present in the promt of the main shell I use. On Z-Shell and PowerShell exists well implemented PowerLine themes to present those informations in a clean way. To get this style and also the for me important auto-suggest and history-search feature I installed some modules and customised the PowerShell profile.

PowerShell Configuration

Modules

There are a lot of infrastructure extensions to customize shell's to be able to easy install packages which extend or modify the look of your shell. For Fish-Shell "Oh-My-Fish", for Z-Shell "Oh-My-Zsh" and this Oh-My-Sh** continues with "Oh-My-Posh" for PowerShell.

Install-Module -Name oh-my-posh
Install-Module -Name posh-git -AllowPrerelease

For additional module packages take a look at the Gallery.
There is also a upcomming second "Oh-My-Posh".

PowerShell $Profile config

To create a new profile config use New-Item -path $Profile -type file –force.
You can edit your profile config with every text editor e.g. nano $PROFILE.

Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key UpArrow -Function HistorySearchBackward
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key DownArrow -Function HistorySearchForward
Set-PSReadlineOption -ShowToolTips -BellStyle Visual

Import-Module posh-git
Import-Module oh-my-posh
Set-Theme Paradox

May you get an error like PowerShell_profile.ps1 cannot be loaded. ...PowerShell_profile.ps1 is not digitally signed. if so, you should run Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned - This will allow to run any script on the local machine, that has not come from the internet.

PowerLine

For PowerLine support consistent to this setup I could recomend the PowerLine enabled version of the Microsoft Cascadia font "Cascadia Mono PL" configured in your terminal.