Tiernan's Comms Closet

Geek, Programmer, Photographer, network egineer…

VSCode and Markdown Monster with Powershell

A few years back, i created a post showing you how to add an Alias to PowerShell to easily start Sublime Text from a PowerShell command line . This worked well, but this is 2017 (that post is from 2012!) and my daily text editor has changed. I have moved to Visual Studio Code for most of my daily work. It works well 95% of the time. I still use Visual Studio Pro for C# Development, but for quick fixes and work on, say Go or smaller edits, Code is great. For blogging, on the other hand, I am trying out MarkDown Monster but code still has some nice features. We will see how tests go.

Anyway, to upgrade the post, and to be able to use VS Code and MarkDown Monster from your PowerShell command line, I added the following:

Set-Alias code "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe"
Set-Alias mm "C:\Program Files (x86)\Markdown Monster\MarkdownMonster.exe"

You can either run this each time you open PowerShell (a bit of pain) or you can add it to your Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 which lives in your Document\WindowsPowerShell folder. If you dont have one, just create the file, add that piece of text, and next time you open PowerShell, you are good to go.

In my case, i am actually in the Visual Studio Code Insiders group, so my alias is:

Set-Alias code "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft VS Code Insiders\Code - Insiders.exe"

When these are set (and you have restarted your PowerShell windows), you can now run the following commands:

code filename.txt
code folder
mm filename.txt

VSCode will open either files or folders, but it seems Markdown Monster only opens files.

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