powershell

powershell

PowerShell profile for Windows. It is the counterpart of ../zsh on macOS: same section order, same alias names, same starship prompt (see ../starship).

Structure

powershell/
└── Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1   # All configuration

Sections, loaded in this order:

1. Basic options (console encoding)
2. History and keybindings (PSReadLine)
3. Aliases
4. Functions
5. profile.local.ps1 (if it exists)
6. starship

Which PowerShell

This profile targets Windows PowerShell 5.1, the one that ships with Windows and is the default Windows Terminal profile on this machine. It also runs unchanged on PowerShell 7, which is a separate program with a separate profile directory:

	Windows PowerShell 5.1	PowerShell 7
Profile	~\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\	~\Documents\PowerShell\
Bundled PSReadLine	2.0.0	2.3+
&& / ||, ?:, ??	No	Yes
Default file encoding	UTF-8 with BOM	UTF-8 without BOM

Features

Feature	How
History prefix search	↑ / ↓, via HistorySearchBackward / HistorySearchForward
Completion menu	Tab, via MenuComplete
Suggestions from history	Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionSource History, only active on PSReadLine 2.2+ (see below)
Prompt	starship, same starship.toml as macOS

Suggestions from history

This is the equivalent of zsh-autosuggestions. -PredictionSource needs PSReadLine 2.1+ and -PredictionViewStyle needs 2.2+, but Windows PowerShell 5.1 bundles 2.0.0, so the profile guards both behind a version check and silently skips them on 5.1. To turn them on there, upgrade the module:

Install-Module PSReadLine -Scope CurrentUser -Force

Then restart the terminal. On PowerShell 7 nothing is needed.

Aliases and Functions

Names match ../zsh/.zshrc so muscle memory carries across machines.

Name	Does
vim	nvim
psconfig / vimconfig	Open the PowerShell / Neovim config
.. / ...	Go up one / two directories
gorepo	cd ~\repos, or gorepo <name> for a repository under it
g, gst, ga, gc, gco, gsw, gb, gd, gl, gp	git, status, add, commit, checkout, switch, branch, diff, pull, push
gtree	git log --oneline
showstash	git stash list
gitcleanup	Fetch with prune, then delete local branches whose remote is gone. Uses git branch -d, so branches with unmerged commits are kept

cls is not defined here: PowerShell already ships it as an alias for Clear-Host.

Shadowed built-in aliases

gc, gl and gp are built-in aliases for Get-Content, Get-Location and Get-ItemProperty. PowerShell resolves aliases before functions, so the profile removes those three aliases before defining the git functions of the same name.

The removal applies to every session that loads this profile, which includes scripts run without -NoProfile:

powershell.exe -File script.ps1              # gc is git commit here
powershell.exe -NoProfile -File script.ps1   # gc is Get-Content here

So a script using gc, gl or gp as shorthand for the cmdlets will behave differently depending on how it is invoked. The full cmdlet names are never affected. To keep the built-ins instead, delete the foreach ($builtin …) loop and the three functions of the same name.

Encoding

The file must stay UTF-8 with BOM. Windows PowerShell 5.1 reads a BOM-less .ps1 using the system ANSI code page, which turns the Chinese comments and the emoji in gitcleanup into mojibake. The profile also sets [Console]::OutputEncoding to UTF-8 so that output and Nerd Font glyphs render correctly.

Installation

Requires PowerShell 7 with Developer Mode on, or an Administrator shell; see the root README for why 5.1 cannot create the link unelevated.

$Profile51 = "$HOME\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1"
Move-Item $Profile51 "$Profile51.backup"   # if one exists
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path $Profile51 `
    -Target "$HOME\repos\dotfiles\powershell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1"

Machine-Specific Config

Put anything that should not be committed (work aliases, tokens, local paths) in profile.local.ps1, next to the profile in ~\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\. It lives outside the repository, so it can never be committed by accident. The profile dot-sources it if it exists — the same role ~/.zshrc.local plays on macOS.

'function gowork { Set-Location "$HOME\repos\work" }' |
    Add-Content "$HOME\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\profile.local.ps1"