An ISE for PowerShell 7

Microsoft has said it plainly: the Windows PowerShell ISE is no longer being developed. It belongs to Windows PowerShell 5.1, and 5.1 is in maintenance.

If you spent years in the ISE, you know why that stings. It shipped on every box. F5 ran your script, F8 ran the selection, and after a run your variables were still sitting in the console where you could poke at them. The script pane hid until you needed it. None of that was fancy. It was comfortable, and comfort compounds over a decade of daily use.

The standard advice is to move to VS Code. VS Code is good. It’s also a general-purpose editor with an extension bolted on, and some of us wanted the other thing: a scripting console that happens to have an editor attached, tuned for PowerShell and nothing else.

DetentShell is that. The layout and the keys match the ISE closely enough that your hands already know it. Underneath, the engine is PowerShell 7 itself, hosted in-process through Microsoft’s PowerShell SDK, with the debugger wired to the engine’s own debugging API and completion served from your live session. Since a lot of work still runs on 5.1, you can also open a Windows PowerShell 5.1 session in a tab next to your PowerShell 7 one. Both at once, in one window.

Some things to know up front. This is an independent product from Detent Point, a small software company; it is not a Microsoft product and doesn’t claim to be. We rebuilt the behavior we missed by using the old tool and taking notes, then added things the ISE never had: a compatibility badge that tells you whether a script will survive PowerShell 7, a script hardening tool, Pester test generation, and an accessibility story we can back with tests.

The rest of this series covers one feature at a time, including the bugs we hit building them. The app is headed for the Microsoft Store; the posts will note when that changes.

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