Skip all Write-Host when debugging

[ALIENQuake]

Prerequisites

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Summary

Hi,

recently I've been facing many 'Write-Host' instances and it slows down executing the next lines.

Any way to skip such lines? Does the debugger can skip some lines at all?

Proposed Design

No response

[Sydney Smith]

Thanks for the issue, @ALIENQuake

We actually believe that the slowness is due to PowerShell being in a debugging state which takes away some of the optimizations

[ALIENQuake]

That might be true but even so, this feature request is not about slowdowns during step-by-step debugging. It's about not having to press F10/F11 several times without losing any valuable information when debugging. Let's consider the following example:

New-MyCommand -Value '1'
Write-Host "Title:"
Write-Host "Output A: $A"
Write-Host "Output B: $B"
Write-Host "Output C: $C"
Write-Host "Preparing next steps"
New-MyOtherCommand -Value '1'

When I'm debugging this code several times, I don't really care about what Write-Host lines will show. I only care about the effect of two commands that actually do stuff.

Please reconsider this.

[Patrick Meinecke]

It's not an uncommon practice for folks to actively step Write-Hosts that contain state to see the values as execution happens. While log points or utilizing hover/variable pane may be a more (subjectively) efficient pattern, skipping Write-Host would be confusing for a lot of users.

If you have a large portion of code you'd like to quickly step over, the easiest workaround is enclosing them in their own scriptblock:

New-MyCommand -Value '1'
& { 
    Write-Host "Title:" # Once you step here, use "Step Out" to get to `New-MyOtherCommand`
    Write-Host "Output A: $A"
    Write-Host "Output B: $B"
    Write-Host "Output C: $C"
    Write-Host "Preparing next steps"
}

New-MyOtherCommand -Value '1'

[github-actions]

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