Windows PowerShell is a powerful scripting and programming language. PowerShell ISE (Integrated Shell Environment) is a tool that provides a PowerShell interface to develop the script and run PowerShell commands. PowerShell ISE provides GUI (Graphical User Interface) in order to make debugging, test, run, save scripts in an easy way.
Windows PowerShell ISE Features
The Windows PowerShell ISE provides the following features.
- Multiline editing: You can create multiline scripts and edit them easily like an IDE or text file without navigating back and forth.
- Tab Completion: You can type the start of the command, variable, or another data structure and then press tab in order to auto-complete the given command or variable.
- Syntax Coloring: The script will be colored according to the syntax which makes reading the script easier.
- Selective Execution: You can execute single or multiple selected lines from a script file by omitting other lines.
- Context-Sensitive Help: Windows PowerShell ISE has extensive help where the help information is provided according to the context you are working on.
- Right-to-Left Language Support: Not all languages are like Latin language and some of them like Hebrew, Arabic is right-to-left where they are also supported for development.
Open PowerShell ISE
PowerShell ISE can be opened in different ways but the most practical one is typing “ise” to the start menu. From the listed applications there are two Windows PowerShell ISE where one of them has the (x86) at the end of its name. This means this PowerShell ISE is 32-bit.
The start screen is like below. where it provides a PowerShell command-line interface or interpreter, a help menu, menu about different actions.
PowerShell ISE GUI
PowerShell ISE is an advanced script development tool that provides the following functions and features with its GUI.
PowerShell Interactive Shell
An interactive shell is the same as the default Python interactive shell or command line. You can copy, paste with this interactive shell.
Help Menu
The help menu provides help information for different commands which are listed below. We can type the command name and take a look at the command syntax, parameters, usage, examples. Also, command search can be limited to a specific module.
Tool Bar
The toolbar provides icons for new script files, open script files, save script files, debug, redo, undo, etc.
Create New PowerShell Script (.ps1) File
A new PowerShell script file can be created by clicking the empty page button on the left of the toolbar. This will open a clear, empty, and new page where we can put PowerShell scripts and run them in the following PowerShell script file. The newly created PowerShell script file will be named Untitled.ps1 but can be changed while saving. Also, we can see that the commands are suggested and their usage and syntax information is provided.
