Customizing Your Prompt in Powershell

As I’ve been using Windows more and more (Visual Studio <3), I’ve grown to really like Powershell. I was showing my brother around some of the more powerful features of Powershell (for example, easy access to the entire WMI namespace of machine information), and I realized “Why don’t I make my prompt show my battery information?” as an exercise in tweaking Powershell.

Turns out, it’s pretty simple. To get battery information, you use the WMI APIs, in particular the Win32_Battery object, which you can get by calling the following:

$battery = Get-WmiObject Win32_Battery

Once we’ve got the battery object, we can generate a short “status” string that we can use for charging/AC but not charging/etc. states:

switch ($battery.BatteryStatus) {
    { $_ -eq 2 } { $status = "AC" }
    { $_ -eq 3 -or $_ -eq 4 -or $_ -eq 5 } { $status = null }
    { $_ -eq 6 -or $_ -eq 7 -or $_ -eq 8 -or $_ -eq 9 } { $status = "Charging" }
}

The BatteryStatus values come from the MSDN documentation for Win32_Battery (generally, MSDN documentation for WMI is fairly good).

From there, we can calculate a timespan for the remaining battery time, and choose a color to represent our remaining charge:

$time = [timespan]::FromMinutes($battery.EstimatedRunTime).ToString()
switch ($battery.EstimatedChargeRemaining) {
    { $_ -lt 25 }  { $color = 'red'; break }
    { $_ -lt 50 }  { $color = 'red'; break }
    default  { $color = 'white' }
}

We use the .NET TimeSpan object to convert minutes to a useful string, and a simple switch against EstimatedChargeRemaining (an integer percentage of battery left) to pick a color.

From there, we can concoct our final prompt string (or rather the battery status portion of it):

$realStatus = if ($status -ne $null) { $status } else { $time }
$batteryPercentage = $battery.EstimatedChargeRemaining
$text = "[battery: {0}%, {1}]" -f $batteryPercentage, $realStatus

And finally write it to the console by calling Write-Host:

Write-Host $text -foreground $color -nonewline

I use this in combination with posh-git to get repository status on my prompt, so a typical prompt on my Windows laptop looks somewhat like this:

C:\vcs\Mutiny [master] [battery: 95%, 08:27:00]> git status

In this case, Mutiny is my blog theme, and yes, that 8:27 figure is hours and minutes. Extended batteries are the best. :-)