How to set up your own custom aliases on PowerShell

2025-03-04

I've found great gain and satisfaction in setting up and maintaining over the years a small set of my own utilities to simplify routine tasks.

The beauty, I find, of command line utilities, is that they are infinitely composable and programmable.

The command line shell, serving as the glue logic, when paired with the local file system, has provided a powerful programming environment that has stood the test of time for many decades now.

I've done this since much earlier for my Linux system with the Bash shell and I've recently gotten around to doing it for my Windows system as well using the native Windows Shell, PowerShell Core.

PowerShell scripts

PowerShell scripts are text files with the “ps1” extension. Each line of the script file is evaluated in sequence, from top to bottom, as it would if you'd type it out in the shell yourself.

Setting up functions

You can define functions as follows:

Function Greet-User {
    Write-Output "Hello, World!"
}

A common pattern (but not a requirement) is to set up functions names in the format of Verb-Noun.

Setting up aliases

Unlike Bash, I've found aliases have to point to functions. Setting up an alias for the above function could go as follows:

Set-Alias -Name greet -Value Greet-User

If there's need (say there's already an alias defined as greet), the -Force parameter can be supplied to override that previously alias for the current shell session.

Loading up aliases at startup

Every shell session, same as Bash, starts from scratch.

Since there's no context from the previous runs, the aliases and functions that you may have set up on the previous session won't persist.

How to remedy that? With shell scripting, of course.

PowerShell allows one to setup an optional script which will always be run at new shell startups, called “profile.ps1” (probably getting it's name from the same “profile” script on Linux/Unix system which has the exact same function).

This script is run for every session, thus it can be employed to set up the aliases.

The two most convenient locations PowerShell will look for it are:

$HOME\Documents\PowerShell\Profile.ps1

$PSHOME\profile.ps1

The full list of paths, and their order of priority, is fully detailed in the about_Profiles manual entry.

My own aliases

One of the most routine tasks that I as a software developer does is interacting with a git repository through the command line.

I'd strongly encourage you to find the set of tools and scripts that works for you. As an example and starting point, below you will find mine with added comments.

# helps verify that the startup commands have been loaded
$path = $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path
Write-Host "Loaded profile from: $path" -ForegroundColor DarkGray
Write-Host ""

# update all scoop-managed software in my computer
function Update {
    scoop update --all
}

# update my own checked out personal repository
function Update-BrederOrg {
    Push-Location -Path $env:USERPROFILE/breder.org
    git add .
    git stash
    git pull origin main
    Pop-Location
}


# directory navigation

function CdProfile {
    Set-Location -Path $env:PROFILEROOT
}

function CdBrederOrg {
    Set-Location -Path $env:USERPROFILE/breder.org
}

function CdUp {
    Set-Location -Path ..
}
Set-Alias -Name .. -Value CdUp -Force


# git helpers and aliases

function GitStatus { git status $args }
function GitAdd { git add $args }
function GitCommitMessage { git commit -m $args }
function GitCommitAmend { git commit --amend --no-edit $args }
function GitPullOriginMain { git pull origin main $args }
function GitPush { git push $args }
function GitPushForce { git push --force $args }
function GitDiff { git diff $args }
function GitDiffStagged { git diff --staged $args }
function GitLog { git log --grep="garden: update from termux" --invert-grep --oneline $args }
Set-Alias -Name gs -Value GitStatus -Force
Set-Alias -Name ga -Value GitAdd -Force
Set-Alias -Name gcm -Value GitCommitMessage -Force
Set-Alias -Name gca -Value GitCommitAmend -Force
Set-Alias -Name gpom -Value GitPullOriginMain -Force
Set-Alias -Name gp -Value GitPush -Force
Set-Alias -Name gpf -Value GitPushForce -Force
Set-Alias -Name gd -Value GitDiff -Force
Set-Alias -Name gds -Value GitDiffStagged -Force
Set-Alias -Name gl -Value GitLog -Force