Vim with Powershell

user_4407 0
Viewed 24622

I'm using gvim on Windows.

In my _vimrc I've added:

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

function! Test()
  echo system("dir -name")
endfunction

command! -nargs=0 Test :call Test()

If I execute this function (:Test) I see nonsense characters (non number/letter ASCII characters).

If I use cmd as the shell, it works (without the -name), so the problem seems to be with getting output from powershell into vim.

Interestingly, this works great:

:!dir -name

As does this:

:r !dir -name

UPDATE: confirming behavior mentioned by David

If you execute the set commands mentioned above in the _vimrc, :Test outputs nonsense. However, if you execute them directly in vim instead of in the _vimrc, :Test works as expected.

Also, I've tried using iconv in case it was an encoding problem:

:echo iconv( system("dir -name"), "unicode", &enc )

But this didn't make any difference. I could be using the wrong encoding types though.

Anyone know how to make this work?

powershell vim
13 Answers

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.

user_1087530

Try replacing 

"dir \*vim\*"

with 

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

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

Mark_Schill_94820

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!

David_Mohundro_45700

Combining the answers in this and the related thread, add the following to your $profile assuming you installed diffutils from chocolatey:

Remove-Item Alias:diff -force

And add the following to your ~/.vimrc:

if (has('win32') || has('gui_win32')) && executable('pwsh')
    set shell=pwsh
    set shellcmdflag=\ -ExecutionPolicy\ RemoteSigned\ -NoProfile\ -Nologo\ -NonInteractive\ -Command
endif

make sure shellcmdflag is exactly as shown

All credit for these solutions to their respective contributors, this is merely an aggregation post.

user_2624580

I'm running GVim v8.2 (Windows).

Using the fullpath to the executable works for me:

set shell=C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe
user_77942990

I don't use VIM but Powershell's default output is Unicode. Notepad can read unicode, you could use it to see if you are getting the output you expect.

Admin1
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