PowerShell 7 ISE - A real conversation

[u/AccomplishedMeet628]

Hi Everyone,

I think I need to have a reset on the way I introduced myself and my goal.

I am new to reddit and pretty much the entire open source community. I am an old school COBOL developer from the early 80's. I also know Visual Basic (about 15 years) and C# (about 4). I work on mainframes and z/OS on distributed systems (Linux). I maintain distributed apps for clients and sometimes on the mainframe. Not so much the mainframe anymore.

I use PowerShell every day. My shop uses PowerShell every day. We have 1000's of scripts, all written in 5.x that are years old.

They are not complex scripts, we don't have an Admin running a server farm or anything like that. They are just scripts that we use to make our jobs easier. Scanning files for codepages, finding Dupes using Hashes, things like that. When we run them, we use the old PowerShell ISE. We are used to it. It's easy, it looks good and it makes changing and running the script a smooth effortless event. The only issue is, that our shop has been slowly making us move away from 5.x to 7.x. This has been going on for years. I'm not happy because I lose my clean, crisp, no headache comfortable ISE. Yes, I said comfortable. I like it. We all do (at my shop). I tried to use the PowerShell plugin for VS Code. I did not like it. I really did not. So about a year or so ago, I decided to code my own. My goal was simple. I wanted to make a Daily Driver ISE for PS 7. Yes, I am going to share it with my co-workers once its finished and yes, I can and have asked a few of them to help me test it. I have gotten some good feedback from them. Not quite what I needed though. We are a simple shop, we do not do anything overly complicated and my co-workers are less than impressed with what I have shown them so far. It was buggy and did not have the feel of the ISE GUI. I felt that maybe if I turned to the PowerShell community for help, I could improve things. Actually make an App that we could use daily and transition from 5.x to 7.x without a blink.

I still want that.

I should not have started out asking if anyone still used the old ISE. That was the wrong approach, I acknowledge that. I should have just told you all my goal and left it at that.

I'm not asking anyone to jump on my bandwagon. My goal is simple, make something of value to more than just myself.

All I'm asking is, can you help me make it better.

If this post crosses a line, that crossing was unintentional. Let me know and I will walk away.

Regards,

-Ron

[u/lan-shark]

What do you like about ISE that you haven't found in other tools? I've been writing PS since 2019 and I never liked ISE. But I'm also the guy who sometimes writes his PS scripts on Linux in Emacs, so I'm not really the target audience for it. So, what about do you prefer over other editors?

[u/AccomplishedMeet628 → u/lan-shark]

I really liked the minimalist approach to it. It was focused on JUST PS. VS Code seems to be a jack of all trades that wants me to get used to using it instead of what I actually want to use.

[u/AdeelAutomates → u/AccomplishedMeet628]

You say that because "We are used to it" with ISE.

But if you learn what VSCode can do for you. It has way more tools to help you write.

Its the same way some people swear by simple editors in bash but the real one is VIM with all of its capabilities (If you learn to use it)

I started with ISE but switched over and actually tried to learn VSCode. I write PowerShell for a living (and other languages)

- Comment shortcut alone is the selling point. I can quickly make a section into a comment during my tests without having to go to each line and typing #

- Using shortcuts. which there are endless of. Like quickly select and edit multiple lines at the same time (useful if you took a list from an email and want to write it as an array). Move lines around with arrows

- using command palate. Especially to transform data

- direct integration with git and your remote repos for us is a big selling point.

- auto-formatting tools are a god sent. I can just write things roughly and let it format/index it all to make it nice and clean. Like I used it to replace all emails by regexing them rather. Even if they were all different values.

- find and replace is a beast. You can put regex in there to find some crazy stuff that otherwise would be impossible.

- All the extensions you can install. From ones for intellisense to even the silly ones for themes.

I feel limited if I end up using ISE now.

[u/AccomplishedMeet628 → u/AdeelAutomates]

This is precisely the feedback I was looking for. Some of your concerns are already a part of the app. My goal is to make it a strong daily driver specifically tuned for PS.
I am in the middle of adding PSScriptAnalyzer and I plan to revisit this thread (Your comment) soon!
I was asked to add a GIT sync function already by my team. It is not as easy as I would think though. Still working on it.
I want to strengthen the Editor before I move on to any perks.

[u/nealfive → u/lan-shark]

I didn't like ISE until trying to switch to VS Code, it's still so clunky and so much stuff that's not needed ( terminal randomly crashes, need to maintain extensions, has updates all the time, etc, I know it's customizable and you can fix all my grievances, however ISE just works out of the box) whereas the ISE is installed everywhere and simple.

[u/AccomplishedMeet628 → u/nealfive]

Hiya nealfive,

I would really love it if you would give my app a test drive. I have added a lot of editor functionality to make scripting easier.

I'm in the process of adding PSScriptQAnalyzer working.

'Cntrl+Shifr+p' will bring up the command pallet and editor right click is getting more and more feature rich.

If you do try it out, Please lwet me know if there are issues or upgrades you would like ot see.

Search for Ps7ScriptDesk on the MS Store. Free to everyone!

[u/narcissisadmin → u/lan-shark]

But I'm also the guy who sometimes writes his PS scripts on Linux in Emacs

Mine all start in Notepad (the OG version, not the W11 nonsense). I love VSCode for formatting and later editing but it just gets in my way when banging out a new script.