Configure PowerShell extension in VSCode on macOS

I have 3 Mac computers running on the latest version of MacOS, and PowerShell is installed on all of them using Homebrew:

brew install powershell/tap/powershell

I also have VSCode and the PowerShell extension installed on all of them.

I noticed the other day that I wasn’t able to get vscode to format PowerShell script on one of the Mac computers. I then tried on the other two and none of them worked. Looks like it’s a common issue across all my Mac computers.

When I tried to format the script, I got the prompt to search and install a formatter.

To Troubleshoot this, I opened the integrated terminal in VSCode checked the output from PowerShell extension. I found the following error message:

It seems that VScode doesn’t know the path to the PowerShell executable.

To fix it, I found the location in a terminal window using the where command:

Then configured the powershell.powerShellAdditionalExePaths setting in VSCode as the error message suggested and pointed it to the location of the PowerShell executable. I also followed this instruction and added powershell.powerShellDefaultVersion setting in the settings.json file.

After this, I restarted VSCode and opened the PowerShell script again. This time, I was able to format the script without any issues. The output from the integrated terminal also showed that the PowerShell extension was able to find the PowerShell executable.

Since I also have to use Windows and Ubuntu (WSL) for work, I don’t want these settings to be sync’d to my Windows laptop because the PowerShell path would be different on Ubuntu and Windows. So I have configured the settings sync to ignore these settings in the settings.json file. I added the following lines to the settings.json file:

"settingsSync.ignoredSettings": [
  "powershell.powerShellAdditionalExePaths",
  "powershell.powerShellDefaultVersion"
],