Why does PowerShell 5 from Windows 7 not have the same features as Windows 10?

Question

I upgraded my PowerShell from 4.0 to 5.0 (Feb. 2016 release) on my Windows 7 SP1 machine.

The $PSVersionTable shows PowerShell 5.0, but the shell does not have the same features as PowerShell 5.0 in Windows 10.

Differences:

Keyword highlighting
Text selection with Shift+Arrow keys
Copy/paste with Ctrl+C/V

Why is there a difference?

How to get/enable these missing features?

Install/Import [PSReadLine](https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine) to get the visual editing features you see in Win10 (where PSReadLine is included by default) — Mathias R. Jessen, Mar 06 '16 at 17:07

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 06 '16 at 17:23

Some features come from the PSReadLine-module that is preinstalled in Win10. You can install this manually from github or by running:

Install-Module PSReadLine

Some features come from Windows 10-enhancements to the console host conhost.exe that is used by default for powershell and cmd. conhost.exeis a part of windows itself and not Windows Management Framework which Powershell is a part of.

Why does PowerShell 5 from Windows 7 not have the same features as Windows 10?

1 Answers1