2018-04-11

Making things easier with a PowerShell profile

PowerShell is my go-to terminal. I use it a lot, mainly for git commands, but for things like mongo, js tooling (gulp etc), the dotnet cli, among others.

Like similar tools, PowerShell allows you to create a custom profile that gets loaded each time you start a new session. This profile can be utilised for creating shortcuts, aliases and functions that make everyday tasks and commands quicker and easier.

By default, each time PowerShell is launched, it will try and load a .ps1 file called Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 from %USERDIR%\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\.
You can see the expected profile path by typing $PROFILE…

Unfortunately, this file does not exist by default, so you will have to create it. The easiest way to do that is…

…create the directory if it does not exist:

1	mkdir $env:USERPROFILE\Documents\WindowsPowerShell

…and then create your profile with:

1	New-Item $PROFILE

Once the file has been created, you can open it for editing…

1	ii $PROFILE

ii is an alias for the PowerShell command Invoke-Item.

Aliases

Create aliases to commonly used commands or programs using the Set-Alias command. For example, create an alias to launch notepad from the terminal by typing np…

1	Set-Alias np notepad.exe

Functions

Alternatively, you can create a function to encapsulate more behaviour.

This example creates a shortcut for listing globally installed npm packages…

1	function npmGlobals(){ npm ls -g --depth=0 }

Some simple git examples

As I said before, I primarily use PowerShell for running git commands, so I’ve created some shortcuts for the git commands I use often:

Shortcut	Command	Function
gs	git status	function GS() { git status }
gf	git fetch –prune	function GF() { git fetch –prune }
gc	git commit -m	function GC() { git commit -m $args[0] }

Modifying the prompt

The default PowerShell prompt looks like this…

You can override this by including a Prompt function in your profile…

function Prompt {
    Write-Host ""
    Write-Host ("$ ") -NoNewline -ForegroundColor Gray
    Write-Host ($(Get-Location)) -NoNewline -ForegroundColor Yellow
    Write-Host (">") -NoNewline -ForegroundColor Gray
    return " "
}

I’m sure there are many ways to do this, but the way that works for me is using OneDrive. I have my personal profile stored in my OneDrive so that it is synced to each computer that I use. Then I just create the file explained in the steps above and simply ‘dot-source’ my actual profile…

My Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

1	. 'C:\Users\Alex McNair\OneDrive\PowershellProfile.ps1'

My Profile

You can check out my current profile on GitHub.

Ramblings