Customizing your PowerShell window colors

Stacy Simpkins

The information about the settings for your PowerShell’s shell colors are stored in the object model at:
System.Management.Automation.Internal.Host.InternalHost and at
System.Management.Automation.Internal.Host.InternalHostRawUserInterface

under the PrivateData and RawUI Properties

you can see the various settings by typing

$host.PrivateData and pressing enter

PS C:\Users\Stacy> $host.PrivateData

ErrorForegroundColor    : Red
ErrorBackgroundColor    : Black
WarningForegroundColor  : Yellow
WarningBackgroundColor  : Black
DebugForegroundColor    : Yellow
DebugBackgroundColor    : Black
VerboseForegroundColor  : Yellow
VerboseBackgroundColor  : Black
ProgressForegroundColor : Yellow
ProgressBackgroundColor : DarkCyan

Or by typing $host.UI.RawUI

ForegroundColor:             DarkYellow
BackgroundColor:            Black
CursorPosition:                 0,70
WindowPosition :             0,21
CursorSize:                       25
BufferSize:                        120,3000
WindowSize:                     120,50
MaxWindowSize:              120,84
MaxPhysicalWindowSize: 274,84
KeyAvailable:                    False
WindowTitle :                    Windows PowerShell

Now if you don’t care for the red error text and would rather see it in green, type this

(get-host).PrivateData.ErrorForegroundColor = 'Green'

 

You also could have used Get-Host alias $host, like this:

$host.PrivateData.ErrorForegroundColor = 'Green'

 

Either way, powershell will just prompt back to normal, it will seem like nothing happened.  You can verify that it worked by typing this

$host.PrivateData.ErrorForegroundColor = Green

 

without the single quotes and including Green.

It will result in an error, the error text will be Green with a black Error background color.

If you want to see information about the User Interface

$host.UI.RawUI | gm

 

If you wanted to change the background color of your current shell to black:

$host.ui.rawUi.backgroundcolor = 'Black'

 

press enter

cls

press enter

If you want your shell to always open up with a black background, you could create a folder in your my documents folder and name this new folder, WindowsPowerShell.  Then create a .ps1 file and include these two lines of code:

$host.ui.rawUi.backgroundcolor = 'Black'
cls

 

This channel, by Don Jones, on YouTube has really, quick and easy PowerShell tutorials on the above information and more:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D474E721138865A

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