Corey Roth [MVP]

I love me some PowerShell.  I use it a lot in the context of SharePoint 2010, but I use it just as much on my own laptop.  If you have been administering and configuring SharePoint enough, you have become accustomed to the shape and size of the PowerShell window that you get when you run the SharePoint Management Shell.  That’s just the way I prefer things to look when I am in the command prompt now.  However, by default, when you run PowerShell in Windows 7, you get this huge window that is just cumbersome. 

That’s why I thought I would share these quick configuration settings to make your PowerShell experience in Windows 7 just like in SharePoint.  Start by finding PowerShell in the start menu, right click and go to Properties.  Jump over the Layout tab and you will find the first settings we need to change.

Let’s compare it to the settings on the SharePoint Management Shell.

From the screenshots, you can tell there are a few differences in the Screen buffer size and the Window Size.  Let’s talk about Window size first.  Start by reducing the Window size width from 120 to 80.  You then want to change the Window size height from 50 to 25.  You then want to adjust the Screen buffer size.  I set the Width to match with a new value of 80.  However, I leave the height at 3000, because having a bigger screen buffer is nice when you want to scroll back and look at something.  Here are what my modified settings look like.

Once you’ve changed the layout, you may want to also change the color back to black instead of the Windows 7 default color.  That’s easy to do by going to the Colors tab.  Just click on the black box with Screen background selected.

That’s all there is to it.  Click OK and then open a new PowerShell window.  Your new command prompt will look just like the one in SharePoint 2010.

So it’s kind of weird tip for today but I find it useful because I like it when PowerShell looks this way. :)  Try it out and see for yourself.  You can customize other value as well.