Description

If you like getting things done more than you like pointing and clicking, you already love PowerShell. Now make it better with Sean.

See the hackathon video

If you like getting things done more than you like pointing and clicking, you already love PowerShell. But to get those things done, you have two options today for interaction with PowerShell: the rather oldschool blue shell, with horrid cmd-like tab completion, or the ISE. The latter offers more modern interactions, but drags your hand over to the arrow keys—or worse, to the mouse—in order to navigate completions and has a non-unixy separation of commands and outputs. You can try Console2 which is fine, but you can't drop it into your new WPF app when you want to add PowerShell support to your app. Sean is a PowerShell host in a WPF control, with keyboard interactions similar to unix shells, which for many people may be more productive.

Project Home Page

This is a simple WPF-based PowerShell host. It behaves very like bash in an xterm, so offers:

• Superfast reverse-searching of history. Typed a long command beginning with "foobar" several commands ago? Just type "foob[UpArrow]" to retrieve it.
• Tab completion which works well with long completion lists, and minimizes keystrokes to get where you need to go
• The ability to insert WPF objects into the output stream (sean-insert-xaml)
• Clean progressbar implementation
• A clean out-of-band debug stream to which running scripts can send messages (sean-write-debug)

But!

• Runs with set-executionpolicy remotesigned by default. This is a feature.

• Like all other WPF hosts, interactive commands will not work. So if you type ftp you'll just get the [busy] prompt until you hit CTRL-C...

PS C:\> ftp
[busy]> _CTRL-C_

To work around this, type start ftp to run it in a new window.

Etymological note

The correct spelling of the Irish name is Seán, pronounced like Shaun the Sheep. But the Irish for "the old ways" is "sean-nós", pronounced "Shan Knows". So theoretically the shell is pronounced "Shan the Shell", but even I have just started pronouncing it like the sheep...