So, I’ve been working on PoshConsole for awhile now, and with the help of some of the guys in #PowerShell@irc.freenode.net have been playing with trying to find ways to enhance output, like using ANSI escape sequences, and even creating an Out-WPF cmdlet which can output objects as databound WPF controls which look really good.
We have been trying to find a way to incorporate the colored and even bold/italic formatting in a way that would be compatible with the existing format-* cmdlets, and we’ve even looked at replacing out-default with a cmdlet that would be compatible with the default PowerShell host. But today I finally locked in on the import of this post on the PowerShell blog. It’s just not possible.
The format cmdlets (Format-List, Format-Custom, Format-Table, Format-Wide) output data in the form of undocumented .Net objects which are “subject to change without notice,” and are therefore basically useless. Of course, that means that if you want to replace Out-Default you have to not only replace the output, but you have to replace the formatting cmdlets, and of course the Update-FormatData cmdlet too — in fact, you have to either parse the largely undocumented format data files, or create some replacement for them to allow users to specify formatting for types you haven’t thought of…
All of this amounts to what many of you probably already knew: it’s a lot of work to create a complete PowerShell host, but it’s at least as much work to create a replacement PowerShell formatter.