It’s been almost 3 years since PowerShell Core debuted for Linux and Mac, and as we’ve increased our cmdlet coverage more and more, one cmdlet has always stood out as a top, cross-platform request. Today, we are excited to announce that Out-GridView is debuting on all Core-supported platforms through the GraphicalTools Module.

Linux Windows Mac

Installation

If you want to get right to it:

Install-Module Microsoft.PowerShell.GraphicalTools

Features

Out-GridView is a visualization tool to help you deep dive into objects returned from PowerShell.

Piping Get-Process into Out-GridView

Quick Search

Easily locate data points matching a query.

Filters

Display specific data matching only selected filters. Supports common string comparison operators, such as contains, equals, starts with, etc..

DataGrid

Rearrange, sort, and select columns to display. Auto-generates object columns based on the PowerShell format type data, expands PSObject properties if no format definition is available.

PassThru

One of the most powerful features, the -PassThru parameter lets you use the GUI to select data to send further down the pipeline.

Get-Process | Out-GridView -PassThru | Stop-Process

If you were so inclined the above script uses -PassThru to create a pretty effective emulation of Windows Task Manger.

Show Code

Sometimes, you need to automate infrequent but complex tasks where filters may be error-prone. Out-GridView can be used as a filtering tool for these cases to ensure that your filters will produce the output you expect.

Occasionally, you end up needing to repeat this automation and so it would be useful to port your existing Out-GridView workflow to a script.

Pressing the “Show-Code” button will do this for you. It will generate a PowerShell filtering script that is ready for production.

Using Show Code to find a specific instance of VSCode

Examples of Out-GridView

The Future

We are looking for a community member to help port Show-Command and Show-Object . Check out the repository and post in the issue tracking Show-Command if you’re interested.

With the majority of the brunt work integrating PowerShell & Avalonia done, we are also open to submissions for new graphical commands or packages. A huge thanks to Adam Driscoll for showing the potential of Avalonia + PowerShell with PSAvalonia.

Lastly, check out the great work AvaloniaUI is doing for cross-platform, .NET Core-based GUIs if you haven’t already.

John Zeiders Software Engineering Intern PowerShell Team