Windows PowerShell profile

Date: November 6, 2013

Windows PowerShell is very powerful tool. It contains many useful commands. One of my favorite features is possibility to use some well-known bash commands such as: ls or pwd, which are missing in Windows Command Prompt. The cool thing is the fact, that PowerShell contains combination of Windows Command Prompt and Bash shell commands. E.g. for copying you can use copy (Windows) and cp (Bash).

You can also have personal configuration file (like .bashrc in Unix) to set some persistent settings. To find out, where it is located use command:

PS C:\> echo $PROFILE
C:\Users\jj09\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

I needed to create directory 'WindowsPowerShell' and profile file before adding some custom settings. Additionally, I needed to enable scripts on my system (it is disabled by default).

PS C:\> Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

More info about Execution Policies can be found here.

My Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 file:

set-alias subl "C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 2\sublime_text.exe"
set-alias grep select-string
set-alias ssh New-PSSecureRemoteSession
set-alias sh New-PSRemoteSession
set-alias l ls

There is also 'Power' version of PowerShell called ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment). Be aware, that it has different profile file (for me it is: C:\Users\jj09\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShellISE_profile.ps1). You can check it with the same command like for standard PowerShell (echo $PROFILE). Here is a list of top 10 killer features, which are in ISE, but not in standard PS (Intellisense is my favorite).

PowerShell-autocomplete

Disadvantage of PowerShell is its loading time. Windows Command prompt loads instantaneously, but PS need ~1 second. It is even worse in case of ISE, which needs ~3 seconds (on my Thinkpad X220: i5/8GB/SSD).

You can add custom configuration to Windows Command Prompt too. To do that you need to run command prompt with some arguments.

Tags: tools