PwshPaint: A pixel art editor for the terminal in PowerShell

I've always used shell scripting of various types and tend to work to whatever is available in the operating environments I'm working in.

If I'm doing stuff in Windows-land I'm going to use PowerShell because it's readily available and it's an "object"-ively good shell scripting language as it's tightly integrated with the OS (Windows treats everything as objects).

Bash is tightly integrated with the unix-like OS's where the OS treats everything as text and the shell scripting environment plays well with that. Trying to use PowerShell to integrate with tooling that assumes you want to always receive text can be a pain especially when it sends debug messages over stderr which PowerShell treats as an exception (looking at you git).

I still use pwsh on Linux for things like Github actions because being able to do something like this is nice considering how often you need to interact with JSON based apis, rather than getting the raw text of some json property using jq you get the actual type and can use .NET to deal with them:

  $responseVariable = Invoke-RestMethod "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1"
  Write-Host "Title is '$($responseVariable.title)'"
  Write-Host "Title is a '$($responseVariable.title.GetType())'"
  Write-Host "UserId is '$($responseVariable.userId)'"
  Write-Host "UserId is a '$($responseVariable.userId.GetType())'"

  > Title is 'some text blah blah blah'
  > Title is a 'string'
  > UserId is '1'
  > UserId is a 'long'

I think I've been using bash-like stuff for ~15 years and PowerShell for the last 3 and now that it's cross platform I reckon it's definitely worth having a look at, I wasn't so keen on learning when it only applied to Windows Server management.

It isn't bash

What are you struggling with? Everything you need is built into pwsh.

Reasons I love it:

- Objects > strings

- One tool instead of many

- The entire C# std lib is there if I need it.

- Sane syntax vs bash.

I work in identity and access in a shop where active directory, sql server, and other MS stuff is prevalent (There's Linux too, but fate dropped me in Windows land). I'd never fight someone to make them love it, but it's been abundantly useful to me.

Also, I started with very little scripting experience and very little programming experience. I'm someone that learns tools best when I have something to either build or fix with them. Because PowerShell has access to .net, it ended up pushing me into C#.