Customize PowerShell

-So as you look at my PowerShell window, you'll notice that I have a scroll bar across the bottom. This is a bad thing. Now this isn't a huge scroll bar but it does make the text shift back and forth. And if you wind up with a really big scrolling area what can happen is some Powershell output will wind up floating off the right side of the screen. So we're gonna fix that. Go after this icon here. Hit properties. The options tab, you can kinda configure whatever you want. You want a bigger cursor? That's fine.

I like to pick a better font. And I'll kinda show you what I'm talking about with the font in just a sec. It defaults to raster font. Change it to one of these other two fonts. Pick a font size you like. The real key stuff is on the layout tab. You wanna make sure that the window size width and the screen buffer size width are the same. You can see mine's off by one so I'm just gonna change it real quick. Once I do that and hit tab, watch this little preview window over here. Notice that the little horizontal scroll bar in the preview went away.

Now I wanna hit okay. That horizontal scroll bar also vanishes from the main window. That means all of my output will appear in the window and it won't be floating off. I won't have to scroll to see things. So that's kind of a good trick to avoid a lot of different confusing points. The other thing to watch for are these two characters. And to a lesser degree, these two characters. That first character is a back tick. It's also called a grave accent mark. On a U.S. keyboard it's usually located in the upper left.

It's right below the escape key usually on the same key that has the till, the little curly thing. The second character there is a single quotation mark or an apostrophe. And it's very important that you select a font that will allow you to easily differentiate between those two characters. It's really really easy to mess em up and it will really mess you up if you confuse them. The third character there is just a curly bracket. And the last one is a parenthesis. Those are pretty easy to tell apart in this font but make sure that you can tell the difference between them as well as the square bracket.

PowerShell uses all of those for something different so sometimes it's not a matter of picking a different font. Sometimes it's a matter of going back to this properties menu and picking a bigger version of the font. That way those characters stand out a lot more and you won't find yourself struggling to figure out which one is which.