PowerShell Help Community Edition updated

One of our most popular community tools received a long awaited update. All the content was brought up to speed and now contains the latest help text from Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell 4.0.

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Here is a reminder why this tool is a must-have in every PowerShell users toolbox:

  • Easier reading and scrolling through help content than in a console.
  • Ability to query and import help for modules not on your machine.
  • You can attach notes to topics, so if you had your “EUREKA” moment you don’t have to rediscover it the next time you use that cmdlet.
  • About files, providers and cmdlets can be discovered by browsing. PowerShell itself requires that you have at least some idea what you are looking for.
  • The related links at the bottom of PowerShell help content, they are actual links in this tool. So click on them and then click back to return to your starting point.
  • You can tie this as a help display into any editor you like, even the ISE.

The software itself received some minor new features which we will introduce below.

  • Browse by module
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    You can now see the help content included organized by module. That will make it easier to navigate and browse for the things you need.
  • Full text search and title search
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    Previous versions always did a full text search, which could provide and overwhelming amount of hits. This version makes that optional and searches by default in titles only. So searching for service is equivalent to “help service” on the command line.
  • We renamed the executable file. This may sound like not much of a feature, but a Windows “feature” prevented this tool from being pinned to the taskbar because it had “help” in the file name.

To integrate this with your shell or the ISE simply add a little function to your profile. The screenshot below shows the respective profiles in our Profile Editor.

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If you have any questions, ideas, etc. please feel free to post a comment or visit our support forum

You can download this new version of the PowerShell Help Community Edition from http://www.sapien.com/software/communitytools. It is available in 32 and 64 bit.