Forem: Erick Saavedra

How to customize PowerShell

Erick Saavedra — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 22:29:33 +0000

First steps

There are different themes and settings for a nice look of your terminal. Many of these themes use special icons that are just for the purpose of customization (e.g github icon). And to avoid problems with the rendering of these icons and not have these annoying '▯' in console.

First we will start by installing a font with all these icons already included. The particular font is called Meslo Nerd Font. And it belongs to our friends at Nerd Fonts, you can check out more fonts by checking out there page.

Extract the files and choose the source:

We install the font:

Once the font has been installed we proceed to customize PowerShell.

Customizing PowerShell

To avoid problems with PowerShell when executing certain scripts we run this with administrator permissions from the PowerShell console:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope LocalMachine

PowerShell prerequisites

If you don't already have it, install Git for Windows.

Using PowerShell, install Posh-Git and Oh-My-Posh:

Install-Module posh-git -Scope CurrentUser
Install-Module oh-my-posh -Scope CurrentUser

Customize your PowerShell prompt

Open your PowerShell profile with notepad $PROFILE or the text editor of your choice.

In your PowerShell profile, add the following to the end of the file:

Import-Module posh-git
Import-Module oh-my-posh
Set-PoshPrompt -Theme name-theme

Replace "name-theme" with the name of the theme of your choice (e.g. agnoster). Themes!

Now you only have to restart or close and open the terminal again, to see the changes.

Customize your terminal

Open the terminal settings:

We go to the PowerShell section and configure it as we wish but choosing the previously installed source:

We save all the changes, close and reopen the terminal and that's it. We have our configuration on screen:

I know. It looks horrible all that copyright marking next to my settings. Just one more thing and we're done.

We open again the terminal configuration, and choose "Open JSON file":

Now with your favorite editor (mine vscode) we edit the configuration part with PowerShell adding "-nologo":

And now we have it, our terminal clean and beautiful:

Note:

To have the same configuration in the vscode integrated terminal we have to add this in the .json file of the settings:

  {
      "terminal.integrated.fontFamily": "MesloLGM NF",
      "terminal.integrated.shellArgs.windows": "-NoLogo"
  }

If you still have problems with icon rendering, you can try installing this font Caskaydia Cove Nerd Font and configuring it on your terminal. Otherwise you can try any of the others in their Nerd Fonts List.

Thanks for making it this far, if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments. 🎉

Rubymine, add a Ruby interpreter using WSL.

Erick Saavedra — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 02:33:25 +0000

I've been playing with Windows Subsystem Linux or WSL for a while now and the advantages of having a working Linux kernel inside my OS (Windows 10). Among which is to be able to configure the Ruby interpreter for my IDE (Rubymine) with the version of Ruby that I have installed in my wsl. For it I will continue with graphs that help in this configuration.

Add an interpreter

1: Open the Settings / Preferences

2: In the Ruby SDK and Gems page, click the + button and select New remote:

3: Provide a path to the Ruby executable, for example:

/home/user-name/.rvm/rubies/ruby-X.X.X/bin/ruby for Ruby installations usin rvm.
/home/user-name/.rbenv/versions/X.X.X/bin/ruby for Ruby installations using rbenv.

4: Udpate the interpreter path:

Ruby or version manager path: /home/user-name/.rbenv/versions/X.X.X/bin/ruby

Summary

In this simple way we can take advantage of WSL to work with Ruby in a more efficient and comfortable way. In addition you can install the New Windows Terminal to work with bash, powershell, cmd and others.

Thanks you for making it this far \o/.

How to have a color picker in Windows fast and easy.

Erick Saavedra — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 15:57:37 +0000

Many times its is very tedious to find the code of a specific color when you are searching the web. Whether it is for any work we are doing, be it a software interface or an advertising design among others.

Microsoft has had a lot of positive changes, since they started "embracing" open sourse. They have been adding many great things like wsl2 and winget.

Now let's focus on a productivity tool called Microsoft PowerToys. It adds many features that add "superpowers" to the windows system as such. Among those features is a color picker that works great for any image or within the screen layout.

Here are some images:

(Selecting a random color.)

(When selecting a color, this window shows the color code and its variants.)

Now that we have seen the tool in action, let's see how to get it on our system. To do this we need to meet certain requirements before we can install it.

Requirements:

Windows 10 1803 (build 17134) or later.
.NET Core 3.1 Desktop Runtime. The PowerToys installer will handle this requirement.
x64 architecture currently supported. ARM and x86 support to become available at a later date.

Installing:

There are many ways to install Microsoft PowerToys. The easiest of all is to go to their repository on GitHub, then download the .exe package and install it from that file.

(installable files).

Direct link here: PowerToysSetup-0.43-x64.exe

Once installed, we proceed to run the program. And in configuration we choose to always run the program as administrator.

Then we focus on the feature Color Picker

(Setup Windows PowerToys.)

As you can see, we can activate this feature with the key combination: Win + Shift + C.

We can also choose the output format, among which we have: HEX (default), RGB, HSL, HSV, CMYK, HSB, HSI, HWB y Ncol.

Summary

With Windows PowerToys we can add many new features to our system. With it an excellent color selector. With which we can speed up the production of any work we are doing with just a couple of key combinations Win + Shift + C, and show in the range of formats that we have the one we want.

If you have been able to observe 👀 there are many other cool features, which I will leave for you to take a closer look at.

Thanks for making it this far \o/.