help function does not display 1 page at a time

PowerShell Help
1

I have just installed PS ISE for Win7 64-bit.
$PSVersionTable confirms I have 5.1 running. Everything working perfectly fine.

I am following the book “Learn Windows PS in a month of lunches” (3rd ed.).

At the very top of page 24, it says:
“Help works much like Get-Help, but pipes the output to More, allowing you to have a nice paged view instead of …”.

Perhaps I am misreading this section (3.3), but it does not work as documented.
I type:
help
and the entire contents flash by without a pause after so many lines.
Everything else works exactly as written in the book (so far), except the help cmdlet (function).
Any tips would be highly appreciated.

2

Page by page output only works in a console. If you like to have a comfortable view to help topics even from the ISE you can use the parameter -ShowWindow. It will open a seperate resizable movable zoomable window with the help topic.

3

My sincerest thanks Olaf, but I typed and ran that help command from the console pane of the PS ISE window.

I have tried your suggestion which works perfectly, but cannot determine what I’m doing wrong from the console.

Many thanks in any case for your helpful and informative advice.

Sincerely,
Ramon

4

The ISE console works somewhat differently from the standard PS console. Try it in the regular console instead and see if there’s a difference. It does work for me in a regular console.

But if you need it in the ISE, see if the pipe to More works at all; it may not work in the ISE’s console snapin implementation:

Get-Help about_Splatting | More

If not… well, I guess that other suggestion may have to be your go to. This functionality does seem to work in VS Code – I highly recommend that as an alternative editor if the ISE continues to give you difficulty.

5

Thank you Joel , I will try both.

My sincerest gratitude.

6

Many thanks to both Olaf and Joel. I now have a much better knowledge of how the help function works in PS and PS ISE consol
In PS console, help does display a page at a time.
In PS ISE, help simply dumps the entire list, not giving the user the chance to read a page at a time.

When help is run with the -ShowWindow option, it produces a separate window that allows the help text output to be read forward and backward using a vertical scrollbar on the window. This is best when in PS ISE console.

My sincerest thanks to you both.