As you know, starting with PowerShell V3, we have had the ability to create our own snippets within the PowerShell ISE. I actually covered doing this a while back using the New-ISESnippet cmdlet that is available to use so I won’t re-hash all of that for you. Instead, I will cover using the PSISE object to build an add-on that you can then use to quickly put together a snippet with little effort at all!

Looking at the $psISE object (note that this is only available when you are actually opened up in the ISE), you will need to look at the available methods under the CurrentPowerShellTab property and there you will see the AddOnsMenu property which contains all of the AddOns which are available to use for that particular tab.

$psISE.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu

Here we can see that there are no menus available at this point in time, but soon that will change.

Under this property is the SubMenus property, and more importantly its Add method which takes a number of parameters based on the parameter set that you use which contribute to the building of the AddOn menu.

For this article, I am going with the first set which means that we need to have a DisplayName, a ScriptBlock containing the code that will run and lastly a keyboard shortcut that we can use to quickly call the code in the menu.

Now that we have covered the basics here of building a menu addon, we can now build our menu to create a snippet. I’ll actually have 2 snippet builder menus, one to take the entire script that is in the window and create a snippet and another that will take a selected portion of a script and create a snippet from it. To make it a little more user friendly, I will use Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction to create some input boxes so the required information (Name and Description) can be added to the snippet.

Using the code below, we can create our addons that will then show up in the ISE as well as having their own keyboard shortcut to use.

Create a Snippet from Selected Code in Script File

[void]$psISE.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu.SubMenus.Add("Save-SelectedSnippet",{
    $Text = $psISE.CurrentFile.Editor.SelectedText
    If (($Text -notmatch '^\s+$' -AND $Text.length -gt 0)) {
        Try {
            [void][Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]
        } Catch {
            Add-Type –assemblyName Microsoft.VisualBasic
        }
        $Name = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox("Enter Snippet Name", "Snippet Name")
        $Description = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox("Enter Snippet Description", "Snippet Description")
        If ($Name -and $Description) {
            New-IseSnippet -Description $Description -Title $Name -Text $Text –Force
            Write-Host "New Snippet created!" -ForegroundColor Yellow -BackgroundColor Black
        }
    }
},"Alt+F8")

Create a Snippet from Whole Script File

[void]$psISE.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu.SubMenus.Add("Save-Snippet",{
    $Text = $psISE.CurrentFile.Editor.Text
    If (($Text -notmatch '^\s+$' -AND $Text.length -gt 0)) {
        Try {
            [void][Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]
        } Catch {
            Add-Type –assemblyName Microsoft.VisualBasic
        }
        $Name = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox("Enter Snippet Name", "Snippet Name")
        $Description = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox("Enter Snippet Description", "Snippet Description")
        If ($Name -and $Description -AND ($Text -notmatch '^\s+$' -AND $Text.length -gt 0)) {
            New-IseSnippet -Description $Description -Title $Name -Text $Text –Force
            Write-Host "New Snippet created!" -ForegroundColor Yellow -BackgroundColor Black
        }
    }
},"Alt+F5")

As you can tell from the last parameters, the keyboard shortcuts are Alt-F8 for the selected code snippet and Alt-F5 for the snippet from the entire script file. This might seem familiar as this follows the same logic when it comes to running the code in the ISE (F5 runs all code and F8 runs selected code).

We can go back and verify that this worked a couple of ways first by looking at the properties of the menu…

… or by looking at the ISE menu itself…

And now we can see both of these in action.

Full Snippet

Selected Snippet

Enjoy!