PowerShell's Help doesn't let me Spacebar to scroll.....

Psilocelium

Member
Hey guys,

I am currently learning PowerShell in a college course. Right now we are learning to use the Help system efficiently.

One thing that is bugging me is that running 'Get-Help' is supposed to output help and automatically scroll to the bottom of the displayed help while just running 'Help' is supposed to display only the beginning of the output and pause to let you hit Spacebar to scroll through as you read.

Both commands display in the same way for me. I want to know why running 'Help' outputs the entire help information instead of letting me Spacebar my way through as I read.

What can I do to configure PowerShell to display as it should? I've updated to Version 5 by the way.

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Help is just an alias for Get-Help.
You can have arguments on aliases so you can see exactly what Help is doing by typing Get-Alias -Name "Help" it's also important to note that powershell console behaves differently in the ISE and the straight console. I don't believe there is paging in the ISE, but there should be in the console.
 
Thanks for the advice. You are right, ISE does not page through help but the normal console does.

It's not that big of a deal, but it is annoying to have to always scroll back up after loading 'help event-log -full' or any other help with the -full parameter.

I did know that Help is just an alias of Get-Help but during this video lesson: Getting Started with PowerShell 3.0: (02) The help system
they specify that Get-Help autoscrolls to the end of the help file while just running Help will allow you to page through the help.

Although my course instructor says to mainly use ISE since we will be learning to write scripts as well, I may use the normal console just so I can page through help info haha.:up:
 
A good tip to follow when writing scripts. Don't use aliases. Scripts should be as readable as possible and if you're running a script on different systems they may not have the same aliases as your system.
 
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