Powershell: Properly coloring Get-Childitem output once and for all

I just installed and used https://github.com/Davlind/PSColor which was painless. It supports PSGet so you can install easily with Install-Module PSColor to get it.

Note There is an updated fork of PSColor available as Color: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Color/2.1.0 (Thanks @HackSlash)

The objects aren't transformed so they still support piping. (It's using the New-CommandWrapper mentioned above)

It also supports other things like select-string.

Modifying Out-Default is definitely the way to go. Below a - granted, sloppy - example. I'm using New-CommandWrapper from the PowerShell Cookbook.

New-CommandWrapper Out-Default `
    -Process {
        if(($_ -is [System.IO.DirectoryInfo]) -or ($_ -is [System.IO.FileInfo]))
        {if(-not ($notfirst)) {
           Write-Host "    Directory: $(pwd)`n"           
           Write-Host "Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name"
           Write-Host "----                -------------     ------ ----"
           $notfirst=$true
           }
           if ($_ -is [System.IO.DirectoryInfo]) {
           Write-host ("{0,-7} {1,25} {2,10} {3}" -f $_.mode, ([String]::Format("{0,10}  {1,8}", $_.LastWriteTime.ToString("d"), $_.LastWriteTime.ToString("t"))), $_.length, $_.name) -foregroundcolor "yellow" }
           else {
           Write-host ("{0,-7} {1,25} {2,10} {3}" -f $_.mode, ([String]::Format("{0,10}  {1,8}", $_.LastWriteTime.ToString("d"), $_.LastWriteTime.ToString("t"))), $_.length, $_.name) -foregroundcolor "green" }
           $_ = $null
        }
} 

I have another script which takes care of Format-Wide (ls) case and also has better performance by using dictionaries instead of regex: https://github.com/joonro/Get-ChildItem-Color.