Powershell Terminals

This topic was created by h4rm0ny .

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  1. h4rm0ny
    Paris Hilton

    Powershell Terminals

    I've been using Bash for well over a decade. (About fifteen years?). I'm reasonable with it. I'm now teaching myself Powershell and whilst some of it I like, the default environment is terrible. I'm not talking about the language itself, but the fact that to use Powershell I appear to have to use a single window that I can't set to the width of the screen, doesn't have tabs, has primitive cut and paste (seriously? No keyboard shortcuts and keyboard only highlighting line by line?). There's no history that can persist between sessions... The list is long and growing every time I try to do something serious with it.

    Powershell the "language" seems alright. But are there any better terminals available for it? Surely people aren't tolerating this - especially anyone from a GNU/Linux background. What am I missing, here?

    1. Uffe Seerup

      Re: Powershell Terminals

      Use the Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE). Start it from a shortcut or by simply typing "ise" in the command window. It is always available, even on a gui-less server.

      The ISE has auto-suggestings, sane cut-and-paste, multiple session tabs, remote tabs, command builder window, snippets, source-level debugging etc.

      Alternatively use another console program, such as Console2.

      1. h4rm0ny

        Re: Powershell Terminals

        Thank you. That is a wonderful tool and why is that not the first thing mentioned in any introduction to Powershell? Scratch that - it ought to be the default much like you get a proper shell environment on any GNU/Linux distro instead of just a terminal.

        Thank you very much - that's going to help a lot!

    2. regredit

      Re: Powershell Terminals

      Just install cygwin

      1. Sergey 1
        Pint

        Re: Powershell Terminals

        Oooh, didn't realise the author was trying to use a shell without an OS, just in a game launcher

    3. F.Z.Bunny

      Re: Powershell Terminals

      Dude.. cygwin. Piddle on that Microsoft silliness; use bash under cygwin with rxvt (or whatever its new replacement is).

  2. Steve Knox

    You might want to check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/ee861518.aspx

    There's a list of resources there, including script editors.I haven't gotten deep enough into PowerShell to be able to recommend anything, but I probably will need to soon, so I'll be watching this topic with interest.

    1. h4rm0ny

      Ah, very useful. Thanks. I've struggled to find good starting points for getting into programming on Windows. This is excellent. Cheers.

  3. brepro

    conemu

    Conemu https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

    Stability varies between versions, but it's capable of wrapping most windows console apps, including powershell. Can be configured for xterm-like features, such as mouse-select, copy-after-select and middle-button paste. Alternately, the powershell ISE isn't too bad if you're developing scripts, but a bit of a miss for general use and you lose the xterm select.

    The MS Scrpting Guy has some nifty tips and provides (generally) good references and more-info links.

    Best of luck with it and remember, chained pipes don't work for remoted sessions.

  4. Chas E. Erath

    I understand...

    Cygwin - perhaps overkill, but what the heck, eh?

    http://www.cygwin.com/

  5. MJP

    The default Powershell ISE application may be very helpful to you - it has a more robust notepad-esque environment in the upper half and a normal Powershell terminal below. It's free and included with the Powershell client.

    If you want something way more robust that you can use for further and smoother interaction with WMI, .NET, and other Powershell-inclusive items, check out Powershell Explorer - 30-day demo, but very simple to use.

  6. TheBampot

    I did a MS powershell course recently, and that was pretty much the first thing the trainer told us - fire up the ISE, use that whenever you can.

    The multiple tabs alone are brilliant - i usually keep 3 or 4 tabs open, full of useful snippets of code that i can cut and paste into the script i'm currently making a hash of :)

  7. Naadir Jeewa

    Can vouch for ConEmu.

  8. Caff

    powergui

    http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/powergui/

    Use this in work, very good recently bought out by delll

  9. Alan Bourke

    Cmder all the way.

    it's the best Windows equivalent of a *nix graphical console. Also free and you can install a version with msysgit giving you Git commands.

    http://bliker.github.io/cmder/

    http://bliker.github.io/cmder/img/main.jpg

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    For editing:

    VIM for Windows - as an editor.

    This is probably a GVIM (Gtk+ based) version - but that shouldn't worry you.

    http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc

    Notepad++ - very commonly used text editor for Windows, with plenty of syntax highlighting and other good features.

    http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.6.2.html

    These aren't IDE's, but if you're used to developing BASH scripts, you will also be used to not being able to debug them (thought there *should* be debuggers for BASH, just don't know where...)

  11. Sil

    As an aside there are a lot of ressources to learn powershell. In case you don't already know them:

    http://channel9.msdn.com/search?term=powershell#lang-en=en

    There are a few sessions coming from TechEd North America 2014

    http://www.powershellmagazine.com/

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/

    @jsnover (He's doing a session @ teched 2014)

  12. Clive Galway

    Worth a mention - AHK scripts

    One other scripting tool I have found useful is AutoHotKey.

    Ostensibly a scripting language for macros, it can actually do so much more and can be extremely useful for automation.

    Last time I used it in business was where we wanted custom per-desk phone backgrounds - desk number etc (And ideally to be able to change them on a regular basis - ie hotdesk status) but the only software we had capable of changing the backgrounds was clunky at best and other solutions were not cheap.

    AHK provided a number of features that allowed me (~3 hrs) to code a simple GUI app that could operate the clunky phone software (At a speed way quicker than any human could do it) and perform all the batch upload etc functionality we required - simply click browse and point it to a data source...

    If you can get past the occasionally quirky syntax - it's two languages merged, so sometimes its like "command, parm, parm" and sometimes its like "command(parm, parm)", and variables associated with GUI items are always global - then this can be an incredibly useful trick to have in your box. You get a lot of the functionality you would with a more full-fat solution like C# (you can even call DLLs and stuff) in a shell-script type format, so most scripts should be understandable by anyone who has any coding knowledge.

    Also indispensable for gamers ;)

  13. RobO
    Meh

    NT kernel supports multiple OS flavors

    Interesting with all the comments suggesting various UNIX emulation layers as to cater for BASH users.

    Back in the 90's NT was heralded as being able to support different OS subsystems, Win32, OS2 and Posix programmes. While Win32 of course was the dominant one and OS2 went to oblivion the Posix subsystem actually lingered on for quite some time as subsystem for UNIX (SFU on Windows XP and SUA on later Windows versions). Interix was the company that provided GNU tools and compilers for free until a few years ago.

    If Microsoft had wanted to persuade UNIX fans to use Windows, SUA could have been a huge boon had they not rather sadly decided to kill off the Posix subsystem in Windows altogether. It is still present in Windows 7 Ultimate. On Windows 8 it is only present in enterprise version but marked as deprecated. Granted, the integration with the rest of the OS was far from perfect and always had the taste of being an alpha-version. It wasn't a stable environment on which to run production tools and the GNU compiler never went beyond version 3.3 since Microsoft never got around to commit their amendments to the compiler source code to the Free Software Foundation. Likewise the integration with the rest of the OS like the Windows desktop was flaky, inconsistent and unstable.

    In spite of all this SUA may still be an alternative if you have a Windows7 Ultimate PC for work and want to use BASH.

    1. Craig "Spuddleziz" Smith

      Re: NT kernel supports multiple OS flavors

      I really don't want to start the whole Windows 10 debate but I do use it.

      I used SUA and Cygwin a lot. Today SUA lives on in Windows 10 as Ubuntu on Windows. I then use MobaXterm (awesome tool) to access it. I don't actually really need it as I run Windows on KVM with GPU pass through alongside OS X (macOS, no thanks) on an Ubuntu host. I mostly use it if I'm doing windows development and dont want to resort to an SMB or NFS share for the code in order to work with it in Linux.

      SUA was also the basis for allowing Windows Phone 10 to run Android Apps as it provided a subsystem for Android with certain calls to Google services replaced with the M$ equivalent. It was actually pretty quick (on my Lumia 640 no less) but was a battery hog and they changed their mind and dropped it in favour for the conversion tools we are seeing in Visual Studio now.

      I should add that MboaXterm also comes with a bundled Cygwin instance and X Server. Definitely worth a look but not the prettiest application in the world. Compact mode recommended!

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