Configure the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)

  • 6 minutes

The ISE is a graphical environment that provides a script editor, a debugger, an interactive console, and several auxiliary tools that help you discover and learn Windows PowerShell commands. This module provides a basic overview on how the ISE works. You will learn about more advanced ISE’s capabilities in the subsequent modules.

Panes

The ISE offers two main panes: a Script pane (or script editor) and the Console pane. You can position these vertically, with one above the other or horizontally, side-by-side in a two-pane view. You can also maximize one pane and switch back and forth between them. By default, a Command Add-on pane also displays. It enables you to search for or browse available commands, as well as review and fill in parameters for a command that you select. There's also a floating Command window that provides the same functionality.

Customizing the view

The ISE provides several ways to customize the view. You can change the active font size by using the slider in the window's lower-right area. The Options dialog box lets you customize font and color selection for many different Windows PowerShell text elements, such as keywords and string values. The ISE also supports creation of visual themes. A theme is a collection of font and color settings that you can apply as a group to customize the ISE's appearance. There are several built-in themes intended for designated use cases, such as giving presentations. The ISE also gives you the option to create custom themes.

Other ISE features include:

  • A built-in, extensible snippets library that you can use to store commonly used commands.
  • The ability to load add-ins created by Microsoft or by third parties that provide additional functionality.
  • Integration with Windows PowerShell’s debugging capabilities.

Note

The PowerShell ISE is no longer in active feature development. As a shipping component of Windows, it continues to be officially supported for security and high-priority servicing fixes. We currently have no plans to remove the ISE from Windows. Windows PowerShell ISE won't work with PowerShell 6 and newer. For a similar experience, you can use Visual Studio Code (VS Code) with the PowerShell extension. You will learn more about it in the next unit of this module.