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PowerShell ISE: Use it instead of PowerShell.exe

Many of my colleagues seem to be unaware of any alternatives to the standard powershell.exe command prompt, which is a bit, um, “old school”.

If you weren’t aware of PowerShell ISE, the integrated development environment for PowerShell that you get for free, I’d recommend installing it and using it rather than the traditional PowerShell prompt.  The ISE is superior for several reasons:

• It has a tabbed interface for editing scripts
• It can host multiple PowerShell sessions at once
• It has superior auto-completion.  In fact, the auto-completion in the interpreter’s command-line is better than that of the normal PowerShell prompt, because you can re-position your cursor and get auto-completion without accidentally deleting everything after the cursor (as the command prompt-based one does)
• It supports breakpoints and debugging

For these reasons, I almost never use plain old powershell.exe.

I believe that it comes included with PowerShell for Windows 7, and to install it on Windows 2008 Server, all you have to do is add the PowerShell ISE feature using the Server Manager (or PowerShell).

Tags: PowerShell, PowerShell ISE