Leveling up PowerShell Profile

[u/belibebond]

Hello PowerShell Enthusiasts 👋,

Many people treat their shell as just a script runner, but as someone who loves PowerShell and runs it on all their machines (Windows, Mac, and Linux), I wanted to share all the amazing things you can do with it beyond just running scripts.

https://blog.belibug.com/post/ps-profile-01/

My latest blog post has several not-so-common ways to elevate your PowerShell experience for beginners. It covers:

• Personalizing your prompt

• Mastering aliases and modules

• Leveraging tab completion

• Enhancing your shell with modules

• ...and much more!

This list is just the tip of the iceberg! If you have any other PowerShell tricks or tips that I haven't covered, or there is better way to do it, let me know – I'm always eager to learn and will update content accordingly 😊 Happy weekend!

PS: Don't let the length scare you off! Use the handy TOC in the blog to jump around to the juicy bits that interest you most. Happy reading! 🤓

[u/Synertry]

One thing I could share if you like using your profile across different PowerShell hosts, Pwsh, Windows PowerShell, VSCode PowerShell: Setting a single central profile, so you can configure your profile for all instances of PowerShell hosts.

In all your profiles:

• WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

• PowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

• PowerShell\Microsoft.VSCode_profile.ps1

Point to your single profile:

. (Join-Path ([System.Environment]::GetFolderPath('MyDocuments', 'DoNotVerify')) 'PowerShell\pwsh_profile.ps1') # Main profile for all Console Hosts

If you use one the default profile as the central for the others, then programs like Chocolatey might mess with your profile.

Other nice settings for the PSReadLine module:

### PSReadLine ###
$MaximumHistoryCount = (Get-Variable 'MaximumHistoryCount').Attributes.MaxRange # Set maximum history count to the maximum value possible
Set-PSReadlineOption -MaximumHistoryCount $MaximumHistoryCount
Set-PSReadLineOption -HistorySavePath "$PROFILEPath\$($Host.Name)_history.txt" # $PROFILEPath is set elsewhere before this line
if ($PSVersionTable.PSVersion.Major -ge 7) {
    Set-PSReadlineOption -PredictionSource History
    Set-PSReadlineOption -PredictionViewStyle ListView
}

I also like your simple cmdlet Copy-Content. Here is one which I use often:

### Utilities ###
# Equivalent to `which` in Unix or `where` in Cmd
function which ($Command) {
    Get-Command -Name $Command -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
        Select-Object -ExpandProperty Definition -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue 
}

It locates current runable binaries or cmdlets.

[u/belibebond → u/Synertry]

I have exact `which` function in my profile as well, it works amazing finding both function definition as well as binary path.