DEV Community: Daniel Marczin

Improve your PowerShell experience

Daniel Marczin — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 16:33:08 +0000

Completions

Command completion is somewhat lackluster by default in PowerShell.
Most of the built-in functions have tab-completion support, but for those of us
socialized on ~~better~~ different shells, it might be a bit unusual at first.
Out of the box, TAB invokes the tab completion for files and cmdlets with subsequent presses cycling through the available suggestions.
Pressing Ctrl+Space provides a selection, similar to what ZSH offers for TAB presses.

You can remap these, if you don't want to bother re-learning them.
First, let's open your profile.

code $PROFILE # just use your favourite editor

Then add the following line(s), setting the keys to whatever you're accustomed to:

Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key Shift+Tab -Function TabCompleteNext

To list all the shortcuts with descriptions, just use the command
Get-PSReadLineKeyHandler

Go the extra mile

You can also install the latest version of PSReadLine, which is responsible for your completions, by running:

Install-Module -Name PSReadLine

The latest versions utilize the command history and various plugins for better completions.
One of these plugins is CompletionPredictor, which can be installed just like we did with PSReadLine,
and provides IntelliSense-like suggestion. You can toggle between the default and IntelliSense recommendations by pressing F2.

Install-Module -Name CompletionPredictor

In PWSH you can press F1 after entering a command to see its man-page.

Just use Bash? 👀

While I personally didn't have much luck with this tool,
if you really need those completions for that one program that you use all the time (provided it has completions defined for bash),
you might opt to try your luck with PS bash completions.
This module acts as a bridge between bash and PowerShell, providing you with completions (with some limitations).

Make things pretty

Install Oh My Posh (á la Oh My ZSH), available on Windows, Linux and macOS. Just follow the instructions in their docs.

# Windows
winget install JanDeDobbeleer.OhMyPosh -s winget

# macOS & Linux
brew install jandedobbeleer/oh-my-posh/oh-my-posh

Then install a NerdFont, to display some fancy glyphs, by running:

sudo oh-my-posh font install
# or to run it without elevation use: --user

..and don't forget to configure your terminal to actually use the font(s) that you've just installed.

Next, configure a theme that you like. You can just run Get-PoshThemes which displays all the available themes, and even tells you how set one permanently.

Use git shorthands

You can use the same git aliases that you do in Oh My Zsh by installing the module powershell-git-aliases.
If you are not familiar with them, Oh My ZSH provides a full list on their GitHub.

Just run the usual command to install it and add the module to your profile.

Install-Module git-aliases -Scope CurrentUser -AllowClobber

# then add this to your $PROFILE, and restart your terminal:

Import-Module git-aliases -DisableNameChecking

There it is! Now you can use your gcos, gpras and ggfls to your heart's content.

How I ended up using Colima for Docker on Apple Silicon

Daniel Marczin — Fri, 03 May 2024 21:59:00 +0000

This year I got the chance to work with an Apple Silicon-based MacBook Pro, and what neat machines they are!
Compared to my Dell XPS 9500, the difference is night and day. These ARM based devices are fast and cool (both literally and figuratively), whereas the XPS can often sound like a helicopter taking off.
(It doesn't help that I got a device equipped with a 4K screen, but that's another story).

Because of the pricing change that happened back in August 2021, I couldn't use Docker Desktop that I suppose everyone got accustomed to throughout the years, so just like I did on Windows back then, I started looking for a replacement.

Podman

A lot of well-known Docker alternatives emerged at this point, the most commonly recommended of which must be Podman (along with Podman Desktop).
This is what I use on my Windows machines, and this was the first solution that I tried on the Macbook as well.

The setup was pretty straightforward, as it usually is with Homebrew:

brew install podman-desktop

Everything was working flawlessly, especially with the podman-compose extension installed, which allowed me to run compose files.

The first problems arose, when I needed to run a compose file, that contained x64 images.
Even though, in theory, it should've been possible, it didn't matter how much time I spent on following various tutorials, reinitializing podman-machines, messing with QEMU flags, I just couldn't get the thing working.

Colima

While looking into the issue with Podman, I came across colima.
Apart from being able to run AMD64 images out of the box, there were additional benefits to it, one of which was, unlike podman, colima could use Rosetta 2 for x64 emulation (which is significantly more performant).

Setup

The installation was pretty simple.
First, you need to make sure that you have Rosetta installed:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta

Then just install colima, Docker and compose:

brew install colima
brew install docker docker-compose

Now you can start colima, but let's edit the machine defaults first. You can do both with the following:

colima start --edit

Now edit the configuration file that's just opened in your default editor.
Make the following config changes to use :

vmType: vz
rosetta: true
mountType: virtiofs
# optionally adjust whatever else you want
# I suggest increasing the available cpu cores and RAM by editing `cpu` and `memory`

There! Now you can run all the Docker images you want by using the usual Docker CLI, since colima set itself up as a Docker context.

Drawbacks

Unlike docker-desktop or podman-desktop, you need to manually start colima every time you log off. You can work around this by using brew-services:

brew services start colima

Another disadvantage is that you don't get a GUI. Personally, this isn't a big deal for me, I opted for the -desktop versions just because of the ease of installation (something something Windows user and GUIs) but I only ever used the CLIs anyway.

TL;DR

If you are an individual dev, you can use the good old Docker-Desktop
If you are a business user, and you want a GUI, use Podman-Desktop, unless you want to run x64 images
Otherwise, set up Colima

Originally published at https://marczin.dev on December 10, 2023.