Best PowerShell Editor & Debugger

PowerGUI seems to be it if I read Don’s recent roundup right. 🙂 Let me explain why I think so.

With any product comparisons, teams of the products being compared have bias and feeling that they are not being treated justly, that the criteria are not fair, that some of the features they are really proud of were not considered and so on. This is just the reality. We are passionate about what we are doing and everyone thinks that their However, independent comparisons are very important because they provide some common ground on which you can compare the solutions.

Don Jones reviewed 3 PowerShell script editors and debuggers: PrimalScript, PowerShell Plus, and PowerGUI Script Editor, and found PowerGUI Script Editor and PrimalScript to be the best.

Obviously, considering that this does not take into account PowerGUI Admin Console and MobileShell (in-browser mobile PowerShell command-line to your environment), and that most of PowerGUI Script Editor functionality (excet for source control) is available for free (where as being a for-money thing with competition) – sharing number one spot is a great honor and achievement!

However, if you start looking at details on how the scores were granted you would see that a lot of the features for which we did not get scores are actually present for PowerGUI Script Editor in forms of free add-ons easily available from powergui.org. (Add-ons among other things were out of scope of the review.)

So if you take the review and add the points for these features available as add-ons – PowerGUI ratings will absolutely sky rocket:

• Alias expansion,
• Ability to publish scripts to poshcode.org,
• Transcription support,
• Built-in blue interactive PowerShell console,
• Script signing,
• Smart selection execution,
• View white space characters,
• Word wrap,
• Use virtual white space in your open documents, allowing you to place the cursor anywhere in the document (even after the end of a line),
• Zoom in and zoom out capabilities: great when doing presentations,
• Multiselect in File Open, support for *.ps1xml, *.psc1, *.xml and *.txt files.

A few quotes which I could not help having here:

I was really taken with the maturity and sophistication of PowerGUI… PowerGUI’s snippets feature, in particular, is just seamless and awesome…

PowerGUI, frankly, is pretty complete – and almost everything I wrote about in my review of it comes in the free version. Given the availability of Quest- and community-developed add-ons, I suspect there’s very little you won’t be able to do in PowerGUI. And it’s free. It’s also being very actively developed, and I’ve seen bugs squashed pretty quickly… Frankly, that add-on architecture – and the price tag – has really put PowerGUI on my radar. Unless you need to work on VBScript or other languages, which would definitely push you to PrimalScript, I’m having a tough time seeing why you wouldn’t at least give PowerGUI a shot. In fact, I believe the other commercial editors need to not compete with the Microsoft ISE as much as they need to compete with PowerGUI, especially given the fact that you get such a rich editor for free. Again, I have to admit that PowerGUI hasn’t been on my radar much, but it’s going to be a lot more, now.

I am obviously taking just the quotes I like. 🙂 For full reviews, go to Don’s posts here.

For the record, we love what other companies are doing in the space. Competition is good for all of us and for the common mission we all have on making PowerShell the automation platform in the enterprise. But we love being the best too. 😉