PowerShell: How to get keyboard shortcuts working?

mmo · 30 Sep 2020

I lately switched to PowerShell as my CLI and like it. What I don't understand, though, is, why not all keyboard shortcuts work as one would expect.

E.g. if I open the upper-left corner menu and navigate to Edit => Find I see a "Ctrl-F" at the right side of the menu entry. This suggests to me that one could also call that function using the displayed keyboard shortcut.

However, if I hit Ctrl-F on the command line, nothing happens other than that I get a '^F' displayed. No matter what I do or enter subsequently (e.g. '^Ffoobar<Enter>') I always just get an error message '[?]foobar' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, etc.'
( [?] here indicating a box with some too-tiny-to-read character inside).

So, the ^F and some other keyboard shortcuts that are displayed in the menu are obviously ignored and have no function.
Is there a way to get these working in PowerShell?

Try3 · 30 Sep 2020

I think that Ctrl-F is just a legacy item they should have removed from the Powershell window.

Ctrl-F works in the Command window [old DOS].

The Edit sub-menu entries are the same in both. In fact, all the menu entries are the same in both so MS probably just copied everything from one to the other, possibly with the intention of adding more functions to the PS window later on.

I haven't heard of a way of enabling the disabled controls.

Denis