PowerShell Profiles for Beginners

[hdouglassjr]

Hello!

I just heard the podcast "Living in PowerShell with Jeff Hicks" and found out about your PSIntro module that I find is a great learning resource. And Andrew brought up the concept of PowerShell profiles, that I must admit, is such an important and confusing subject for beginners. I still struggle with it in certain contexts, and I think adding items in this tutorial would be well worth it. In my struggles with learning profiles, here were the areas that make it difficult to grasp:

• Why are there two main versions of PowerShell (v5 and v7.*)?
• Why are there different profiles for each version of PowerShell.
• Why is it that when I run this command: $PROFILE | Format-List -Force that there are multiple paths?
• What does host name have to do with my profile when running this command "$PROFILE | select *hosts* | Format-List"? i.e., AllUsersAllHosts, AllUsersCurrentHost. CurrentUserAllHosts, CurrentUserCurrentHost
• Why would I create a profile script and should a profile script between versions be different?
• Would it be better to have just one profile script for both versions of PowerShell so everything is centralized and not duplicated, and how could I accomplish this since PowerShell itself looks for specific module paths when loading the terminal?

One thing I would like to share is something our PowerShell meetup at my work found useful was this command that I use in my profile script:

• Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete

For me, it gives a visual of all options to use and help save some keystrokes. It's not fancy, but as a beginner it provides information at the same time instead of an iterative tabbing on the command line in alphabetical order. That beginning iterative style took time or I would go over the one I wanted to use causing me to go back to the beginning of the options.

Also, I found this command to create a new profile, just a quick way to do from the command, but as a beginner, you have to know what PowerShell you're in to determine what profile you are creating:

• New-Item -Path $PROFILE -Type File -Force

Love the podcast and hope this could help in advancing the development of the PowerShell community!

Sincerely,
Harry Douglass

[jdhitsolutions]

Thanks for your feedback. I think this is the best topic for the next tutorial.

[jdhitsolutions]

I added a profile tutorial in version 2.0.0. Update the module and run Start-PSTutorial