One of my pet hates about PowerShell is the /b switch isn’t available for get-childItem AKA dir or ls. I just want to read through a list of files in the directory. I don’t want all the other information. At least in the old dir command, the file and directory names were at the start of the line.

So to get around this, I simply just select the Name property from get-ChildItem. But I don’t want to type that every single time. Enter Profile.ps1 and set-Alias.

I have a simple command: List. This shows me exactly what I want to read and no more. You might have something similar for your situation.

You will notice that the alias list actually calls a function. This is because I’m piping the get-ChildItem command to the select command. This isn’t supported by set-alias. So adding this to a function get’s around that minor annoyance.

Oh, you will also notice that I’m changing the colour of the table row header to bright white using a new feature called $PSStyle. At some point, I’m going to script my screen reader to recognise these different colours and tell me what is a directory, what’s an executable, what’s a column header etc. This is the beginning of this process. Colouring the output of get-ChildItem is an experimental feature in PowerShell 7.2 through $PSStyle.FileInfo. I’m trying this out at the moment.
$PSStyle.Formatting.TableHeader = $psstyle.Foreground.BrightWhite
Function GetShortDirectory {
get-childitem | select Name
}


set-alias list GetShortDirectory