Is there a way to make Powershell use forward slashes instead of backslashes for path autocompletion?

Solution 1:

I try to avoid "negative answers", but sometimes there's not much of a choice. At present, I can't think of any good way to do this. There was a Github issue/feature request for this earlier this year, and the PowerShell PSReadLine team replied with it being "As designed".

Just in case, though, I looked through the Get-PSReadLineOption options that are available, but there's no option for the path separator in there.

There's [IO.Path]::DirectorySeparatorChar, but as a comment on this answer points out, it's read-only.

In considering possible alternatives, I couldn't come up with much:

• There might be a way to wrap a PowerShell function around your wsl call in a generic enough way that it could handle different commands. The function would need to parse out the arguments and run a wslpath command around any paths.

  The wslpath command is installed by default in some WSL distributions (Ubuntu, at least) and can be installed on others via the wslu package.

  E.g. wslpath "C:\\" returns /mnt/c

  But then we also get into double-backslash quoting issues, etc. Ultimately, I dismissed this as too hacky and likely to be very "fragile".

• I believe you could handle this in a .NET ArgumentCompleter for the wsl command. I've written one that handles the various flags for the WSL command that you are welcome to use as a base.

  I'm just not sure how difficult it would be to re-write the completer for files/directories, but I have a feeling it's not worth the effort.