PSReadLine

The defaults come out of old CMD.EXE (bad) habits, so so yes are missing like a dozen years of Linux terminal UX experimentation/improvements. One particularly common advice with Powershell is to try PSReadLine for more bash-like versions of tab completion and other line editing things: https://github.com/PowerShell/PSReadLine As for common shortcuts, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Get-Alias (and Set-Alias) is a very useful tool.

This can get you a part of the way, extracted from my PowerShell profile: ## # PSReadLine, see https://github.com/PowerShell/PSReadLine ## ## behaviour of Tab key autocomplete Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete ## From docs: ## With these bindings, up arrow/down arrow will work like PowerShell/cmd if the ## current command line is blank. If you've entered some text though, it will ## search the history for commands that start with the currently entered text. ## ## Like zsh completion. Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key UpArrow -Function HistorySearchBackward Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key DownArrow -Function HistorySearchForward These will allow you to autocomplete previous commands from the tidpids you already types, so it no longer searches linearly through the histor

I was just trying to get a release candidate of PowerShell 7 working on macOS and Windows yesterday. It was a frustrating experience, because many essential keybindings are broken out of the box on macOS (Terminal.app, iTerm2) and Windows (using the new Windows Terminal). For example: ctrl-space is the usual shortcut to trigger menu completion, doesn't work. It's not difficult to make custom keybindings once you figure this out, but many people's first encounter with PowerShell is going to be missing some critical UX features. Not a great situation. https://github.com/PowerShell/PSReadLine/issues/639 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/879

Let me guess... You don't like the path completion? The only credible complaint I've heard against PowerShell terminal is path completion. I call it credible, because it's an actual behavioral difference with meaningful impact. Myself, I actually prefer the Windows path completion, where it fills the entire path and hitting tab again will cycle through the available options. Nothing drives me crazier than going into a directory generally knowing what I want, typing in a few letters, hit tab, get a subset of the path completed, think about what's there and where I want to go, figure out the next letter I need to type, hit tab again and hope for the best. When in reality there's only a few options that match my original text, and just hitting tab to cycle between them is pretty ergonomic. And shift-tab even cycles in the other direction, fo

This might be the PS library he's talking about: https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine

Use PSReadLine instead of ISE.https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine ISE has bugs that the CLI doesn't (ex: splats for hashtable arguments used to not work in ISE - I don't know if that is still true, because I gave up using ISE and have only used the CLI for the last 2-3 years).

https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine perhaps. Personally I find it nice, but it requires a bunch of tweaking to feel comfortable, but maybe less so to people who are used to readline.

> Microsoft recognizes this MS also tried to improve PowerShell by installing the PSReadLine module by default. Read https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine for instructions on how to make PS a bit more usable.

Agreed regarding the default tab completion. You might check out PSReadLine at some point - see https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine. Its goal is to try to emulate readline except in PowerShell (this includes tab completion as well as emacs shortcut keys... vim shortcut keys are in the works AFAIK). It does require some additional configuration and it isn't installed by default, but I think it helps with this specific scenario quite a bit.

At least a few people want vi-mode in the shell, see https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine/pull/101

Yes, 120KB uncompressed. It is statically linked using the VS2013 toolchain. I test it on WindowsXP and use it on my Window7 dev machine. And yes, Powershell works as well. If you use PSReadLine, note that it sets the console to grab mouse events (like Far Manager does for example), so hold the override key (<ctrl>) when selecting or use RevokeMouseInput.ps1 script mentioned here: https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/issues/detail?id=1... see here as well https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine/issues/197

Try https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine - included in Windows 10 now.

> All I really find missing these days is good line-editing Probably familiar enough for bash people: https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine > and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell. Not a terminal emulator (although I think it can do Terminal escape sequences if needed): https://github.com/Maximus5/ConEmu

Not out of the box, but ctrl+v works with https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine