Using peco with Windows (PowerShell) for Incremental History Search

TL;DR

There is an argument that you should just use WSL2 instead of PowerShell. That said, if you are using Windows, you still want to set up a minimal PowerShell environment. Also, WSL2 becomes extremely slow when using external hard drives, which can be quite stressful. When developing on your own PC, storage capacity is a significant concern, and there are times when you want to use an external hard drive.

peco is commonly used with zsh, but it is also a tool that can easily implement incremental search in PowerShell. Since the default Ctrl + r history search is not very user-friendly, let's start by enabling incremental search for command history.

Installing peco

Install using Chocolatey. Administrator privileges are required, so you need to open PowerShell with administrator rights.

choco install peco

Displaying History

PowerShell's input history is saved in a text file at the path shown by (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath. So to retrieve history in PowerShell:

Get-Content -Path (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath | Select-Object -Unique

We also use Select-Object -Unique because we want the command history to be unique.

Piping to peco and Executing the Selected Result

To execute the selected output, use Invoke-Expression.

Get-Content -Path (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath | Select-Object -Unique | peco | Invoke-Expression

So the function to execute is:

function pecoHistory() {
    Get-Content -Path (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath | Select-Object -Unique | peco | Invoke-Expression
}

That's all we need.

Profile

This is PowerShell's equivalent of .bashrc.

echo $profile # Check the path
notepad $profile # Open with Notepad

You can check the path or open it with an editor like this.

Write the function from earlier into this file. Now you can use pecoHistory for a nice incremental search experience.

Registering a Keybind

To set keybinds in PowerShell, use Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler. For built-in functions, write them after -Function, but for custom scripts, use -ScriptBlock. Inside the ScriptBlock, we insert the registered pecoHistory command and execute it.

Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Chord Ctrl+r -ScriptBlock {
    [Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine]::RevertLine()
    [Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine]::Insert("pecoHistory")
    [Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine]::AcceptLine()
}

With this setup, you can use Ctrl + r for incremental history search in PowerShell.

References

Revision History

  • Addressed #65.

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