Skip to main content

F7 is the greatest PowerShell hotkey that no one uses any more. We must fix this.

Thousands of years ago your ancestors, and myself, were using DOS (or CMD) pressing F7 to get this amazing little ASCII box to pop up to pick commands they'd typed before.

Holy crap it's a little ASCII box

When I find myself in cmd.exe I use F7 a lot. Yes, I also speak *nix and Yes, Ctrl-R is amazing and lovely and you're awesome for knowing it and Yes, it works in PowerShell.

Ctrl-R for history works in PowerShell

Here's the tragedy. Ctrl-R for a reverse command search works in PowerShell because of a module called PSReadLine. PSReadLine is basically a part of PowerShell now and does dozens of countless little command line editing improvements. It also - not sure why and I'm still learning - unknowingly blocks the glorious F7 hotkey.

If you remove PSReadLine (you can do this safely, it'll just apply to the current session)

Remove-Module -Name PSReadLine

Why, then you get F7 history with a magical ASCII box back in PowerShell. And as we all know, 4k 3D VR be damned, impress me with ASCII if you want a developer's heart.

There is a StackOverflow Answer with a little PowerShell snippet that will popup - wait for it - a graphical list with your command history by calling

Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key F7

And basically rebinding the PSReadlineKeyHandler for F7. PSReadline is brilliant, but I what I really want to do is to tell it to "chill" on F7. I don't want to bind or unbind F7 (it's not bound by default) I just want it passed through.

Until that day, I, and you, can just press Ctrl-R for our reverse history search, or get this sad shadow of an ASCII box by pressing "h." Yes, h is already aliased on your machine to Get-History.

PS C:\Users\scott> h

  Id CommandLine
   -- -----------
    1 dir
    2 Remove-Module -Name PSReadLine

Then you can even type "r 1" to "invoke-history" on item 1.

But I will still mourn my lovely ASCII (High ASCII? ANSI? VT100?) history box.


Sponsor: Manage GitHub Pull Requests right from the IDE with the latest JetBrains Rider. An integrated performance profiler on Windows comes to the rescue as well.



© 2018 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.
     


from Scott Hanselman's Blog http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/600072732/0/scotthanselman~F-is-the-greatest-PowerShell-hotkey-that-no-one-uses-any-more-We-must-fix-this.aspx

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

dotnet sdk list and dotnet sdk latest

Can someone make .NET Core better with a simple global command? Fanie Reynders did and he did it in a simple and elegant way. I'm envious, in fact, because I spec'ed this exact thing out in a meeting a few months ago but I could have just done it like he did and I would have used fewer keystrokes! Last year when .NET Core was just getting started, there was a "DNVM" helper command that you could use to simplify dealing with multiple versions of the .NET SDK on one machine. Later, rather than 'switching global SDK versions,' switching was simplified to be handled on a folder by folder basis. That meant that if you had a project in a folder with no global.json that pinned the SDK version, your project would use the latest installed version. If you liked, you could create a global.json file and pin your project's folder to a specific version. Great, but I would constantly have to google to remember the format for the global.json file, and I'd constan...

Rail Fence Cipher Program in C and C++[Encryption & Decryption]

Here you will get rail fence cipher program in C and C++ for encryption and decryption. It is a kind of transposition cipher which is also known as zigzag cipher. Below is an example. Here Key = 3. For encryption we write the message diagonally in zigzag form in a matrix having total rows = key and total columns = message length. Then read the matrix row wise horizontally to get encrypted message. Rail Fence Cipher Program in C #include<stdio.h> #include<string.h> void encryptMsg(char msg[], int key){ int msgLen = strlen(msg), i, j, k = -1, row = 0, col = 0; char railMatrix[key][msgLen]; for(i = 0; i < key; ++i) for(j = 0; j < msgLen; ++j) railMatrix[i][j] = '\n'; for(i = 0; i < msgLen; ++i){ railMatrix[row][col++] = msg[i]; if(row == 0 || row == key-1) k= k * (-1); row = row + k; } printf("\nEncrypted Message: "); for(i = 0; i < key; ++i) f...

Data Encryption Standard (DES) Algorithm

Data Encryption Standard is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encrypting the data. It comes under block cipher algorithm which follows Feistel structure. Here is the block diagram of Data Encryption Standard. Fig1: DES Algorithm Block Diagram [Image Source: Cryptography and Network Security Principles and Practices 4 th Ed by William Stallings] Explanation for above diagram: Each character of plain text converted into binary format. Every time we take 64 bits from that and give as input to DES algorithm, then it processed through 16 rounds and then converted to cipher text. Initial Permutation: 64 bit plain text goes under initial permutation and then given to round 1. Since initial permutation step receiving 64 bits, it contains an 1×64 matrix which contains numbers from 1 to 64 but in shuffled order. After that, we arrange our original 64 bit text in the order mentioned in that matrix. [You can see the matrix in below code] After initial permutation, 64 bit text passed throug...