Vim with Powershell

Question

I\'m using gvim on Windows.

In my _vimrc I\'ve added:

set shell=powershell.exe
set shellcmdflag=-c
set shellpipe=>
set shellredir=>

function!          


        

Answer 1

I ran into a similar problem described by many here.

Specifically, calling

:set shell=powershell

manually from within vim would cause powershell to work fine, but as soon as I added:

set shell=powershell

to my vimrc file I would get the error "Unable to open temp file .... "

The problem is that by default when shell is modified, vim automatically sets shellxquote to " which means that shell commands will look like the following:

 powershell -c "cmd > tmpfile"

Where as this command needs to look like this, in order for vim to read the temp file:

 powershell -c "cmd" > tmpfile

Setting shellquote to " in my vimrc file and unsetting shellxquote (i.e. setting it to a blank space) seem to fix all my problems:

set shell=powershell
set shellcmdflag=-c
set shellquote=\"
set shellxquote=

I've also tried taking this further and scripting vim a bit using the system() call: system() with powershell in vim

Answer 2

I propose an hackish solution. It doesn't really solve the problem, but it get the job done somehow.

This Vim plugin automate the creation of a temporary script file, powershell call through cmd.exe and paste of the result. It's not as nice as a proper powershell handling by vim, but it works.

Answer 3

Try replacing

"dir \*vim\*"

with

 " -command { dir \*vim\* }"

EDIT: Try using cmd.exe as the shell and put "powershell.exe" before "-command"

Answer 4

None of the answers on this page were working for me until I found this hint from https://github.com/dougireton/mirror_pond/blob/master/vimrc - set shellxquote= [space character] was the missing piece.

if has("win32") || has("gui_win32") 
     if executable("PowerShell") 
        " Set PowerShell as the shell for running external ! commands 
        " http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7605917/system-with-powershell-in-vim      
        set shell=PowerShell 
        set shellcmdflag=-ExecutionPolicy\ RemoteSigned\ -Command 
        set shellquote=\" 
        " shellxquote must be a literal space character. 
        set shellxquote=  
   endif 
endif 

Answer 5

I suspect that the problem is that Powershell uses the native String encoding for .NET, which is UTF-16 plus a byte-order-mark.

When it's piping objects between commands it's not a problem. It's a total PITA for external programs though.

You can pipe the output through out-file, which does support changing the encoding, but still formats the output for the terminal that it's in by default (arrgh!), so things like "Get-Process" will truncate with ellipses, etc. You can specify the width of the virtual terminal that Out-File uses though.

Not sure how useful this information is, but it does illuminate the problem a bit more.

Answer 6

Interesting question - here is something else to add to the confusion. Without making any changes to my .vimrc file, if I then run the following commands in gvim:

:set shell=powershell.exe
:set shellcmdflag=-noprofile
:echo system("dir -name")

It behaves as expected!

If I make the same changes to my .vimrc file, though (the shell and shellcmdflag options), running :echo system("dir -name") returns the nonsense characters!