In my current season, I have been having opportunity to configure new Windows machines that I use for development. And I want to document one of my early tasks, after downloading IDE’s and GIT.

Upgrade PowerShell

As an Azure developer, you’re going to be working with PowerShell, so why not get the latest. As of today, version 7.4.

If you’re version check provides a v5 answer, that’s the old PowerShell that comes with the O/S. So be careful of the implications.

# Output the list of files foreach
$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
5      1      26100  2161

Be sure to visit Installing PowerShell on Windows. Another cool fact is that v7.4 is running .NET 8 underneath.

Windows Terminal

Make sure you know about Windows Terminal. Get that installed and configured. I do configure to make the newer (modern) PowerShell show up early in the dropdown list, as well as the default shell bed the newer PowerShell.

The Starting Point for Prompt configuration

Oh My Posh is the place to go, to start this effort.

But when you get there, one will have to determine what is important to their development experience, i.e. what do I want to see AND what is helpful to productivity experience. My preference is the following:

• folder structure
• Git info (so I don’t do somethig stupid)
• Time is appreciated
• a little color to help break the potential bland view of a console scree
• which shell’s do I want this assistance

Forturnately, Jan De Dobbeleer, the creator and maintainer of Oh My Posh has created some helpful documentation, as well as some helpful technology.

The ability for a developer to customize their environment is useful and helpful - as everyone has their own unique combination of choices. And Oh My Posh provides the ability to chose from others’ themes, as well as make your own (if you have time for that).

There are plenty to chose from on their Themes page. One of my favorites is Takuya. But I’m also looking at the ones that support Azure.

After an easy install, another helpful feature is the ability to have this prompt arrive in different shells, like PowerShell and Bash and others. Just follow the instructions for each shell environment that you care to operate in.

Windows Command Prompt

Strangely enough, Oh My Posh does not support customizing the Windows command prompt. Thankfully, Oh My Posh shows how to leverage Clink, and I really like what this Clink tool does for our old friend the Windows CMD prompt.

You’ll see the instructions on making a Lua script (used at Windows CMD startup to inject Clink). Since I wanted to use the Takuya theme from Oh-My-Posh, I was required to create a LUA script.

-- Jon's oh-my-posh.lua

--get the path striung to where Oh-My-Posh themes are stroed
local posh_themes_path = os.getenv("POSH_THEMES_PATH")

--LUA string interpolcation to create the full path reference to the theme
local theme_file = posh_themes_path .. "\\takuya.omp.json"

--fire up oh-my-post and load the Takuya theme
load(io.popen('oh-my-posh.exe --config="' .. theme_file .. 
'" --init --shell cmd'):read("*a"))()

Took me some time to figure out the syntax, but I’m happy with the outcome. This even appears in VS Code’ command prompt terminal.

Another wrinkle is there the LUA script should go. So use CLINK INFO to get the scripts location.

A Final Reference

Microsoft provides a list of other developer tool topics: Set up your development environment on Windows. Nice little read to see what all MSFT suggests to developers about their machine.