Intellisense for (Powershell/Windows Terminal) #14986

PSReadLine script was existing long time ago. I looked to the post suggested but still no graphical enhancement for a real Intellisense with a brief help as it was into Powershell_ISE
Now with the (Windows Terminal) Built on (electron) technology, they can do it even much better, same like it is with autocomplete into VSCode

Amacc, One needs to run Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler every session, from one's profile. Is there any other way to persist Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler keys across sessions?

Thanks for all the replies, I understood all these details as I’m having long time experiences with such these things as a programmer. (PSReadLine) is introduced as a plug-ins just to beautify and colorize the textual Command line similarly to (ZSH) in linux. But still a textual interface. My post here is to suggest to powershell developers to integrate again the old (Intellisense) that was already done with (Powershell_ISE). Similarly to what into the screenshot attached.

I wonder about Microsoft strategy sometime invent some nice and helpful then they abandon it without any reasons. As if someone is walking 1 step forward then 10 backward. Similarly is done with the development of new (Powershell core). While there was so much more functionalities into old (Powershell 5) they abandon it in the new core version and some only some are moved to (.net) with more complexity to use them.

With time they realize about some useful options and they re-integrate them like the option (-ShowWindow) that they return it back recently. Hopefully the same soon about the (Intellisense)

What we had in the ISE isn't coming back. The ISE is a UI project, and PowerShell is fundamentally a shell application. The PowerShell team apparently never owned the ISE project itself, and they don't have the liberty to open source it from what I've heard.

They also don't appear to be wanting to integrate UI functionality into the shell itself; the majority of that effort has been put into PSReadLine and the VS Code extension. The PowerShell shell itself is not intended to ever be a full UI / IDE, so it's probably never going to have pretty UI menus like the ISE did.

Ayan Mullick (@Ayanmullick), So there is no way to integrate it directly into the powershell process itself, but you can easily save the powershell profile to perform these steps with no direct action on the users part. I created a repo with my profile and its contents and some of the folder around it here. Its been a minute since I have been in a remote shell but I would assume that it would have an environment initialization hook of some sort, so copying your remote host would do it, I can check into that use case later however.

OS-den (@osdenprog) Yeah the ISE isnt really a terminal, its a gui bolted onto a terminal, and IMO makes a terrible IDE. And I would agree its not a 1:1 replacement but a number of the use cases can be solved on the command line, intellisense is really a prediction use case, an autocomplete use case and a documentation/help man page use case rolled up into one. But if what you are looking for is the sanctioned supported platform its VS Code, it is the replacement to the ISE and allows the common conventions of a proper IDE. The powershell plugin is pretty good, not a lot of gripes with it, you get intellisense, debugging, remote execution, plugins and all the other niceities of a proper IDE.

I understand that (PowerShell) is a command line shell application. From other part (Windows Terminal) is a new terminal open source project from Microsoft relying on (Electron) UI & communicates under the hood with the (PowerShell) interface.
It would be a nice suggestion if to integrate the (Intellisese) into the (Windows Terminal) but unfortunately WT teams, they don’t have any open forum discussion for suggesting new ideas at their page.
Moreover if they’ll integrate this option it’ll work also for the terminal of VS-CODE.

Now Microsoft ships PSReadLine with the PowerShell installation although still very primitive with options comparing to old legacy Pwershell_ISE

Maybe, but compare like-with-like. PowerShell ISE was a GUI IDE, so a far better comparison with would be compare it to VS Code, which already has the plugins and integrations that you are asking for.

rhubarb-geek-nz
WT is also a GUI & has the extensibility option. To integrate on it the autocomplete with help will not transform it to IDE. At least to be more smart similarly to Linux terminals like Zsh or others.
I used Powershell_ISE as example only to explain better the similarity intent option needed to integrate it in WT PowerShell.

The boundary between PowerShell and its terminal is stdin, stdout and stderr using ANSI escape sequences. Are you saying that Windows Terminal should have it's own custom escape sequences to support this behaviour or is it something that the PowerShell PSReadLine module can do with any terminal with ANSI escape sequences and hence work on Linux, MacOS etc and over SSH?

For WT you might want to subscribe this issue microsoft/terminal#3121

At least to be more smart similarly to Linux terminals like Zsh or others.

Zsh is not a terminal, it is a shell. A terminal's jobs is to manage a stream of characters and present them as a grid on the screen. It should have no interest or understanding of any meaning of those arrangements of characters. A terminal presents what the program it is connected to tells it to show. Any understanding of what is being shown belongs to the program providing the stream of characters. So in your example, zsh provides autocompletion suggestions not the kernel terminal driver, not KDE Konsole, not CDE dtterm, not X11 xterm, not gnome-terminal.