PowerShell Cookbook, 4th Edition

Chapter 19. Visual Studio Code

19.0 Introduction

While text-mode PowerShell is great for its efficiency and automation, there’s not much to be said for its UI. As far as console applications go (especially in Windows Terminal), it’s amazing. But compared to the experience you get from traditional Integrated Development Environments, it’s got a ways to go.

All of these are simple side effects of pwsh.exe being a console application. These problems impact every console application on every operating system and likely always will.

Aside from the UI oddities, the fatal flaw with console applications comes from their lack of full support for the Unicode standard: the way that most international languages represent their alphabets. While the Windows console supports a few basic non-English characters (such as accented letters), it provides full support for very little else. The Windows Terminal application vastly improves this, but its coverage is still not complete.

This proves to be quite a problem for worldwide administrators! Since typing international characters directly at the command line was so difficult, administrators in many countries were forced to write scripts in Notepad to get full Unicode support, and then use PowerShell to run the scripts, even if the command was ultimately only a single line.

PowerShell resolves these issues by offering full-fledged integration with Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code gives PowerShell the UI you expect from a modern application, ...