Powershell is great but is a little boring if anything, out of the box, with its drab white foreground and all. It isn’t exactly informative either, so I wanted to show everybody a quick trick to customize this look and feel to make things look a little bit cleaner. Hopefully this introduction will demonstrate one of the many features that makes Powershell a great tool for Windows admins, which is its flexibility.
This customization file, called profile.ps1 can be located in one of two places.
- The first location is the global location and would be useful when you want all users to have a customized Powershell profile. This profile should be placed in C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Profile.ps1.
- The second location is for the local profile and would be specific to each user account. This file overrides the global configuration file and should be placed in C:\Username\My Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Profile.ps1.
By default these files don’t exist so you will have to navigate to the respective directory and create the initial, empty profile.ps1 file.
Once you have the file created just pop this chunk of code into your profile.ps1 file.
function prompt {
$path = ""
$pathbits = ([string]$pwd).split("\", [System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)
if($pathbits.length -eq 1) {
$path = $pathbits[0] + "\"
} else {
$path = $pathbits[$pathbits.length - 1]
}
$userLocation = $env:username + '@' + [System.Environment]::MachineName + ' ' + $path
$host.UI.RawUi.WindowTitle = $userLocation
Write-Host($userLocation) -nonewline -foregroundcolor Green
Write-Host('>') -nonewline -foregroundcolor Green
return " "
}
Once you have this bit added you will need to reload Powershell and voila,
Much better. As you can see we now have some additional, out of the box information including:
- Our current username – jreichardt
- Our computer name – JOSH-TEST
- Our current directory – separated by the | (pipe) symbol
- As well as a nice green foreground font to help with the readability.
Pretty simple to get set up but definitely adds a lot to the default look and feel. Let me know if you have any other cool Powershell customization’s or tricks that you think are worth sharing.
