Do you wish your favorite editor had better PowerShell editing support? Do you have a great idea for a new feature for the PowerShell extension in Visual Studio Code? We’re dedicating next week, December 6th through 13th (Sunday through next Sunday), to hacking together on new features to enable better PowerShell support in any editor!

Here’s the plan:

On Sunday, December 6th at 11AM-12PM PST (7-8PM GMT) I’ll host a Crowdcast event to give an overview of PowerShell Editor Services, the PowerShell extension for VS Code, and other general ideas for contributions that people can make. Participants can join to ask questions and discuss potential ideas so that we can get the ball rolling.

Once hacking has started, we’ll hang out together in the #editors channel of the PowerShell Slack Community so that everyone can get help on their contributions. We’ll be using these discussions to help flesh out documentation about these projects using the GitHub Wiki. Every question asked will be helpful so don’t be shy!

On the week following our hacktivities, I’ll release new builds of PowerShell Editor Services and the Visual Studio Code extension containing our collective efforts. I’ll also post a follow-up report here on PowerShell.org with details about all the contributions that were made in this time.

Ways to Contribute

There are many places where you can contribute even if you don’t have time to write code. Here are some ideas:

Improve PowerShell Editor Services

Write and review documentation for the .NET and JSON APIs

Help provide good PowerShell script examples for validating language intelligence features

Add language features support for files in a PowerShell module project (issue #11)

Add language feature support for PowerShell classes (issue #14)

Check out the help wanted issue label for more ideas!

Improve the PowerShell extension for Visual Studio Code

Create new VS Code “command” features which provide helpful functionality for PowerShell

File bugs for cool features you’d like to see or examples of things that don’t work well yet

Help improve syntax highlighting for PowerShell code (issues #26 and #52)

Add features or fix bugs with the help wanted issue label

Add new editor integrations for PowerShell Editor Services

Sublime Text

Atom

Emacs

Vim

… any other editor you’re interested in!

Use any of these projects during the hack week and provide feedback!

Want to participate?

If you're interested in participating, check out the PowerShell Editor Services Hack Week wiki page and add your name to the participants list. I’ll be tracking the latest details about the event there next week. Don’t forget to RSVP for the Crowdcast event to be reminded when it begins.

Looking forward to hacking with you all next week!

David Wilson @daviwil

Software Engineer at Microsoft