How to colorize the Powershell prompt?

Question

I always make my prompt to be this color in my linux Then I can find my input in the black command window. But can we make the same color in my Powershell?

Answer 1

PowerShell prompts

What you want to do is customise the prompt.

The default prompt in PowerShell 3.0 and newer is:

function prompt  
{  
    "PS $($executionContext.SessionState.Path.CurrentLocation)$('>' * ($nestedPromptLevel + 1)) "  
}

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Colour escape sequences

Now, Windows 10 supports the ANSI escape codes in its conhost, and 24-bit colour is supported since 1703.

To use one of the ANSI escape codes, we need a literal ESC character. This is octal 033, or decimal 27. In Bash, you would use "\033" or "\e"; There's no direct equivalent sequence in PowerShell but you can instead embed an expression: "$([char]27)"

In PowerShell Core you can use the "`e" escape sequence instead. Thanks to the comment by asherber.

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Use in PowerShell

This means you can, for example, use the following escape sequence to set the background colour to cyan with the code 46:

"$([char]27)[46m"

Which can be used like so:

echo "$([char]27)[46mColoured text"

To make things more readable, let's define a variable:

$ESC = [char]27

So we can use:

"$ESC[46m"

Where $ESC is the literal ESC character, [ defines the start of the param list, and m the end.

Using it in a command:

echo "$ESC[46mColoured text"

And to restore the original colour settings, we use the code 0 instead:

echo "$ESC[46mColoured text$ESC[0mUncoloured text"

More advanced colours

If you aren't happy with the basic 16-colour palette, you can use full 24-bit colours with the form:

"$ESC[48;2;<r>;<g>;<b>m"

Where <r> is the decimal value for red from 0-255, <g> for green and <b> for blue, e.g. "$ESC[48;2;255;0;123m"

Please refer to the documentation for more information.

In fact, this is all directly equivalent to what you would do in bash, except you need to use $ESC (after you've defined it) instead of \e or \033.

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Setting a coloured prompt

Putting these together, we can use the ANSI colour escape codes in a modified prompt to change the background colour:

function prompt  
{  
    $ESC = [char]27
    "$ESC[46mPS $($executionContext.SessionState.Path.CurrentLocation)$('>' * ($nestedPromptLevel + 1)) $ESC[0m"  
}

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Persistence

If you want this to persist across sessions, add it to your profile (like .bashrc). You can view the path to your profile in $profile.