pix-powershell

Pi tool — PowerShell execution with pretty output.

What it does

Renders Pi's built-in powershell tool the same way pix-bash renders bash: a compact call line, a full-width status-colored framed output block, a live five-line tail while the command runs, and an auto-collapsed one-line summary such as ✓ powershell Get-ChildItem -Force · 42 lines · 1.2s. Long output fades out bottom-up and ends with a footer such as … 12 more lines (ctrl+o to expand), with your own expand key. Execution is unchanged — it wraps Pi's own createPowerShellToolDefinition (pwsh.exe, falling back to Windows PowerShell).

Output and compatibility fixes

• Plain-text output. PowerShell 7.2+ adds ANSI colour to table headers and errors even when output is piped, which wastes tokens and clutters the transcript. Every command starts with if ($PSStyle) { $PSStyle.OutputRendering = 'PlainText' }. Windows PowerShell 5.1 has no $PSStyle, so the line is a no-op there.
• && / || on Windows PowerShell 5.1. Pi falls back to powershell.exe when pwsh.exe isn't on PATH, and 5.1 rejects chain operators. On 5.1 only, top-level chains are rewritten to $? checks (a && b → a; $__pixOk = $?; if ($__pixOk) { b; … }), and a failed chain at the end of the script still exits non-zero. Operators inside strings, comments, here-strings, and ( [ { blocks are left alone. Whenever a rewrite happens, the output starts with a visible [pix-powershell] … rewrote && / || line.

Windows only

Pi exposes powershell only on native Windows. pix-powershell follows that:

• On non-Windows platforms it registers nothing, so no extra tool schema reaches the model.
• On native Windows it registers the powershell tool at load time, so the tool is enabled automatically. Inside pix-core it stays always on (never deferred), like the default shell. bash stays enabled too.

Auto-collapse

Uses the shared collapse section of ~/.pi/agent/pix.json. Disable for this tool only with:

{ "collapse": { "tools": { "powershell": false } } }

Install

pi install npm:@xynogen/pix-powershell

Bundled in @xynogen/pix-core. Install it alone only if you do not use pix-core.

Full distro

This package is part of Pix. The installer sets up Pi and the full distro. See Install for the notes for each OS.

# Linux / macOS
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xynogen/pix-mono/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

# Windows
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xynogen/pix-mono/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

License

MIT