Skip to main content

Powershell ISE – Increase your productivity


image

For some time now I have been thinking about extending ISE to increase my productivity. Those of you that do heavy “powershelling” are probably already living inside ISEsteriods which is a terrific and professional extension. For all others this might suit your needs or maybe you will find it lacking in some areas.




Why

On the top of my head? Why not. Microsoft has created a powerful environment for us which is free and lacking is some areas. Still with the update regime currently being the “defacto” standard there is no way they would satisfy the demanding needs you guys have. Secondly I was kind of curious if it could be done, and last but not least it was fun.


Disclaimer

Please bear in mind that this is a alpha version 0.1 release and I know there are some issues with it, however it works and demonstrates the capabilities you can implement with very little efforts. I have organized the extension as a module which is built by my build.ps1 script. If you clone the repro and want to make it available in your modulepath, you only need to copy the psm1 and psd1 files in to a folder.


How does it work?

All you have to do is import the AutocompleteISE module in Powershell ISE. When you import the module it will create 2 menu items in the Add-on menu and link those to two keyboard shortcuts:
  1. ALT+3 will toggle comment for the current selectin (multiline commenting/uncommenting)
  2. F2 – will toggle autocomplete events in the scriptpane for the active/current script. Currently you have to actively enable autocomplete for each script-tab. This might change and is not an limitation in ISE.
Please see the readme file on GIT for a listing of autocomplete features currently supported. The readme also include a link to a youtube video showing the features.


Where are the unit tests?

Currently they are in my head. As I have previously stated, I like coding and powershell. Time is a precious constraint and I have been unable to find the time to do them. 


Questions/issues

Look me up on twitter or file an issue on GIT and I will look into it. Also if you have suggestions or find a bug, be a good person and let me know.

Link to the repro: AutocompleteISE


Cheers

Tore

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Serialize data with PowerShell

Currently I am working on a big new module. In this module, I need to persist data to disk and reprocess them at some point even if the module/PowerShell session was closed. I needed to serialize objects and save them to disk. It needed to be very efficient to be able to support a high volume of objects. Hence I decided to turn this serializer into a module called HashData. Other Serializing methods In PowerShell we have several possibilities to serialize objects. There are two cmdlets you can use which are built in: Export-CliXml ConvertTo-JSON Both are excellent options if you do not care about the size of the file. In my case I needed something lean and mean in terms of the size on disk for the serialized object. Lets do some tests to compare the different types: (Hashdata.Object.ps1) You might be curious why I do not use the Export-CliXML cmdlet and just use the [System.Management.Automation.PSSerializer]::Serialize static method. The static method will generate t

Toying with audio in powershell

Controlling mute/unmute and the volume on you computer with powershell. Add-Type -TypeDefinition @' using System.Runtime.InteropServices; [Guid("5CDF2C82-841E-4546-9722-0CF74078229A"), InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] interface IAudioEndpointVolume { // f(), g(), ... are unused COM method slots. Define these if you care int f(); int g(); int h(); int i(); int SetMasterVolumeLevelScalar(float fLevel, System.Guid pguidEventContext); int j(); int GetMasterVolumeLevelScalar(out float pfLevel); int k(); int l(); int m(); int n(); int SetMute([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] bool bMute, System.Guid pguidEventContext); int GetMute(out bool pbMute); } [Guid("D666063F-1587-4E43-81F1-B948E807363F"), InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] interface IMMDevice { int Activate(ref System.Guid id, int clsCtx, int activationParams, out IAudioEndpointVolume aev); } [Guid("A95664D2-9614-4F35-A746-DE8DB63617E6"), Inte

Creating Menus in Powershell

I have created another Powershell module. This time it is about Console Menus you can use to ease the usage for members of your oranization. It is available on GitHub and published to the PowershellGallery . It is called cliMenu. Puppies This is a Controller module. It uses Write-Host to create a Menu in the console. Some of you may recall that using Write-Host is bad practice. Controller scripts and modules are the exception to this rule. In addition with WMF5 Write-Host writes to the Information stream in Powershell, so it really does not matter anymore. Design goal I have seen to many crappy menus that is a mixture of controller script and business logic. It is in essence a wild west out there, hence my ultimate goal is to create something that makes it as easy as possible to create a menu and change the way it looks. Make it easy to build Menus and change them Make it as "declarative" as possible Menus The module supports multiple Men