Enabling the PowerShell ISE Experience on VSCode

You might well be thinking of replacing the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) , now that Microsoft has announced they have stopped actively developing it. Indeed, on Episode 160 of the Microsoft 365 Developer Podcast : Dev tools that make IT Pros smarter; Matthew McDermott, MVP (@MatthewMcD) spoke about the productivity gains offered PowerShell language support in Visual Studio Code through the VS Code PowerShell extension .

This inspired me to reach out to Matt and subsequently the PowerShell extension team on GitHub, in order configure the PowerShell support. This post documents the steps needed

PowerShell Language Support

The PowerShell language support includes

• Syntax highlighting
• Code snippets
• Intellisense for cmdlets ( both in the code editor and the integrated terminal
• Find references to cmdlets and variables.
• Rule based analysis provided by the PowerShell Script Analyser
• F8: to run a selection of highlighted PowerShell script
• Ctrl + F1: to launch online help for the symbol under the cursor

One word of caution on the syntax highlighting support: when comparing the PowerShell ISE, you cannot have the same pop-up dialog when you hit Ctrl + Space in the terminal window, to show object properties or Cmdlet arguments. This is because of a limitation in VS Code. You can however, fallback on the PSReadline‘s “Menu” completion. The next section covers what this means in practice.

PSReadline

PSReadline in the context of VSCode refers to the following new features:

• “Menu” completion is similar to the intellense: select completion with arrow keys but instead uses Ctrl + Space . Note, this is
  which is identical to what you get in regular pwsh.exe.
• Ctrl + Arrow keys ,etc (keyboard navigation of the input line)
• Syntax highlighting of input text
• Multi-line text input (writing a function definition in the console across multiple lines)
• Up / Down Arrow history navigation

Eventually, the team will roll out the full PSReadline experience as discussed in Scott Hanselman’s post, identical to a regular console.

Configure PowerShell Preview Exension

To get PSReadline support you will need add the latest PowerShell Preview extension to VSCode . It works with PowerShell 5.1 and up. Note, If you already have the stable PowerShell extension (1.x.x) , then you will first need to disable this so that you don’t run both versions of the same extension.

You will also to edit your user settings:

Edit User Settings.json

Notepad %APPDATA%\Code\User\settings.json

Then add the following line to enable PSReadline via a feature flag.

Edit Your Personal VSCode Profile Settings

Whilst in the VS Code terminal you will need to edit your VS Code specific profile :

$profile
C:\Users\[User}\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.VSCode_profile.ps1
Notepad $profile

Or if you prefer, to create the file if it doesn’t exist, then open it in VS Code.

New-EditorFile $profile

Note the above profile is only active when working with PowerShell in VS Code . Should you go back to work in the ISE then you will require the PowerShell ISE specific profile .

Then add the short key mappings:

Next, you will need to restart VS Code or execute the command below, to reload the workbench window, for above changes to take affect.

Open the command palette ( Ctrl + Shift + P )

Reload Window

To test, you can set a breakpoint in the debugger and inspect the properties of an object with Ctrl + Space . You should see the PSReadLine experience which is identical to what you get in regular pwsh.exe

Configure PowerShell 7 Support

Test Out Your Chosen Keyboard Binding

Remember the PowerShell Preview is still being worked so should you find and issue you may want to recreate and  attach the logs before submitting the issue.