Question

[dfinke]

Great module! Someone asked, "So where/how would you use this?"

I like this, because when they built I can experiment and figure out applications of it.

Wondering what you were thinking?

[SeeminglyScience]

Hey Doug! That's a great question.  In general I would say it's pretty niche and most people won't
have a lot of use for it.

The main reason I built it initially was to make it easier to draft editor commands and explore $psEditor
and classes from EditorServices. I like to do most of my initial prototyping in the console, and PSReadLine is pretty much required for that (for me anyway).

I recently also used it for troubleshooting.  I wanted to watch the creation and disposing of runspaces to see if an issue was happening whenever a runspace was being disposed. I used something like this:

while ($true) {
    $current = Get-Runspace
    if ($last) { (Compare-Object $current $last).InputObject}
    else { $current }
    $last = $current
    Start-Sleep 1
}

I didn't want to take up the integrated console, so it was nice that I could start up a external PowerShell window, connect to the integrated console, and have this running on another monitor.  Again, pretty niche.

Where I think it may be more broadly useful is in the future when I add Invoke-InEditorServices (wip name).  This would let you run a script block against the default runspace of any or all editor services instance(s), which opens up the possibility of non-interactive processes like scheduled tasks manipulating editor state.

Now why would you want to do that? Not entirely sure yet, but it's a pretty easy next step. My first thought would be generating statistics like percentage of time spent in X language/file, frequency of which cmdlets, etc.  Either way, it's a building block that doesn't yet exist for people more creative than I :)