The console

The console is where hosted PowerShell products historically lose trust: frozen windows on Read-Host, garbage in captured output, color that pollutes log files. DetentShell treats those as engineering problems with tests attached — interactive prompts render as dialogs while the window stays responsive, and captured or redirected output is stripped of color codes the way a terminal does it.

Enter submits, Shift+Enter adds a line, Up and Down recall history, Esc clears the line, Tab completes. Variables persist between script runs and prompt work because they share the runspace. Read-Host, Get-Credential, mandatory-parameter prompts, and choice prompts all arrive as dialogs, correlation-matched to the asking pipeline, so simultaneous prompts from two sessions can’t cross wires. Get-ChildItem shows color; Out-String, Out-File, and > give you clean text, matching stock pwsh. Write-Progress collapses to one updating line per activity. Copying from the console strips color codes. Submissions during a run are refused with a message rather than queued into mystery.

The console is the bottom half of the window, and it’s a full PowerShell. Type Get-Date, press Enter, see the answer. Press the Up arrow to get your last command back. If a script asks a question, a dialog box appears; answer it and the script continues. And after you run a script from the editor, everything it created is still here — type the name of one of its variables to look inside.

Credential prompts never hold the password as plain text in the UI layer, and console copy produces plain text, so screen-side color never leaks into pasted records.