Tag Archives: System.Windows.Forms

Prep Command for Immediate Use

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Edit: I’ve updated this post by adding a really quick video at the bottom — check it out. It briefly shows the results of the concepts in this post.

It was just yesterday when I wrote the Windows Terminal Fun Surprise post. This was a short post about executing the Alt+Shift+D keyboard key combination inside Windows Terminal. I got myself to a point where I could programmatically send in this key combination using the below commands.

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait('%+D')

This got me thinking: Can I use this to prep a command for immediate use? I know, what does that even mean? My profile script $PROFILE, contains a good deal of helpful tools. And then it has something like the PowerShell ASCII art below. It’s actually a work logo, but you get the idea. This laptop with the PowerShell logo will stand in just fine, however.

Function Show-PowerShellAsciiArt {
@"
   ._________________.
   |.---------------.|
   ||   PowerShell  ||
   ||     \         ||
   ||      \        ||
   ||      /        ||
   ||     / ------  ||
   ||_______________||
   /.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.\
  /.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.\
 /.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.\
/______/__________\___o_\
\_______________________/

"@
} # End Function: Show-PowerShellAsciiArt.
Show-PowerShellAsciiArt

As cool as I think this logo is — the one I actually use — and as certain as I am about it appearing every time I open a new terminal, I feel like it’s in the way when I want to start to use my terminal. Like you, I suspect, I want my prompt and cursor in the top-leftish corner and ready to go pretty quickly. The difference is, I’m willing a momentary slowdown. I can do better, however.

The thought was: Can I place a command at the prompt as a part of my profile script, that will allow me to just press Enter to clear the screen? You see, I usually type cls or clear, press Enter and then start with whatever I’m doing. I want the logo, but I also want to get started as soon as I can. The answer to that most recent thought though is yes.

In addition to the above Show-PowerShellAsciiArt function, is one more brief function and a modification to the code that started off this post.

Function Clear-Logo {Clear-Host}

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait('Clear-Logo')

Now, when my profile script executes, it places the “Clear-Logo” text at my prompt, allowing me to just press Enter to clear the image and start doing what I do at the command line. As you can see, Clear-Logo is only there to invoke Clear-Host. Still, I like it better.

Press Enter and voilà.

In order to get a better idea of how this works — just in case, I didn’t do a great job explaining it, who knows — I’ve included a short video below. This shows me opening two new tabs in Windows Terminal and pressing Enter after each is open, and therefore, clearing the screen (the logo).

Windows Terminal Fun Suprise

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I saw a Tweet today from Kayla Cinnamon: https://twitter.com/cinnamon_msft/status/1455946220476657665. Here’s the Tweet.

Although she wrote to type Alt+Shift+D, she obviously didn’t mean it that way. I looked past that, although some of the comments proved that others did not. I quickly figured out what it did and then I determined how to not use that keyboard key combination. Before we see that, let’s determine what Alt+Shift+D does.

Alt+Shift+D opens up a new terminal, or rather, it duplicates the pane. If you take a look at the Settings menu you’ll quickly discover a large number of other fun surprises (a.k.a. keyboard key combinations). Someday, I’ll take the time and work through those.

Anyway, here’s what you shouldn’t do.

[PS7.1.5][C:\] Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
[PS7.1.5][C:\] 1..10 | ForEach-Object {[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait('%+D')}

This lovely piece of frustration — if you can sneak it into a “friend’s” profile script — will add the System.Windows.Forms assembly and then send in the Alt+Shift+D key combination for each iteration through the ForEach-Object loop. In this example, it would be a total of ten times. So it’s been said, the SendWait method includes “%” and “+” in addition to the letter “D.” As you may have already guessed, if you didn’t know, these two symbols are used for Alt and Shift, respectively. So what’s this produce? It does what a good number of people that replied to Kayla’s Tweet showed us they could do by repetitively pressing the key combination. That said, why do it manually? It’s PowerShell!

Back to when she said to “type” the keyboard command. It did make me think to do something with the string value Alt+Shift+D.

In the top-left pane, which was the only one when I started, I created a function called Alt+Shift+D. It included the two commands from earlier. Then I tested it/invoked my new function and it added the pane on the right side. Then I created an alias for my function, because who wants to type out the entirety of Alt+Shift+D each time — not me — and tested it too. It opened the bottom-left pane. If you aren’t using Windows Terminal then you should be; it continues to get better all the time.