PowerShell Studio

I'm not going to mince words about this application.

I've only used it a small amount to get an idea of its functionality compared to my primary PowerShell IDE, VS Code with the official PowerShell extension. Nonetheless, aside from its decent WinForms UI editor and amazing .NET reflection, I heavily dislike it due to, primarily, a major lack of basic customization you'd expect from any mature development IDE or code editor, regardless of the language(s) supported. Secondary to that are a number of bugs and strange inconsistencies encountered. In no particular order…

Pros

• Easy-to-use WYSIWYG WinForms editor.
• Built-in help viewer.
• Amazing .NET reflection including descriptions for classes, members, and parameters via their proprietary "PrimalSense".
• Some limited customization of appearance.
• Snippets use what is essentially Visual Studio's XML schema. This could be a con depending on your feelings, but using a schema-backed, mature file format is a plus to me.
• Very nice presentation at first glance — a (mostly) correctly used ribbon control at top, custom Avalonia (or Actipro, possibly) controls with dockable tool windows, and a couple themes, including dark and light variations.
• Large number of snippets, including many organized by equivalent VBScript operations.
• Decent IntelliSense-like completion provider called "PrimalSense".
• Dockable windows similar to Visual Studio.
• Some XAML editing features.
• Some WPF support (you can convert WinForms designer/code-behind files to XAML).

YMMV

• If you prefer WinForms, you're in luck.
• If you prefer WPF/XAML, you're out of luck (at least until they integrate a real WPF form builder).
• Heavy bias towards mouse-oriented design. If you're a VS Code or NeoVim (or terminal) user, this won't work for you. The lack of shortcut customization is a clear reflection of this. It may take many design cues from Visual Studio, but that has endless customization options.
• No AI integration that I’m aware of. This is either good or bad depending on your views.
• Proprietary organization for designer files which is easy to break. You can't simply import a WinForms designer file from, say, PowerShell Pro Tools and have it parse and convert it using AST/static analysis.
• Limited support for PowerShell Core.
• Basic Git support, although you're directed to purchase their proprietary VersionRecall app for anything more.
• .NET reflection in PrimalSense, while very cool, is based on a cached copy of .NET Framework XML documentation, as opposed to "true" reflection that uses the version of .NET associated with the version of PowerShell being used.
• Proprietary project file format (as opposed to something like the MSBuild-based "pssproj" format used by PowerShell Pro Tools).

Cons

• Extremely inconsistent experience overall.
• Many seemingly integrated features just direct you to purchase another of their apps (VersionRecall, HelpWriter, etc.).
• Unreasonably high price (almost $600 USD) for what it offers, especially considering the wealth of free tools available for PowerShell. The PowerShellEditorServices LSP has associated extensions for almost every major code editors or IDE, including VS Code, Atom, Jetbrains Rider, Sublime Text, NeoVim, and likely more still, not counting other free tools.
• Extremely outdated snippets focusing on quantity over quality. Many of the file modification dates are from as far back as 2011 and use deprecated cmdlets like Get-WmiObject. Some consist of a single operator which would be better served with improved PrimalSense.
• This is a nitpick, but while it's nice they have snippets intended for VBScript equivalence, the snippet for Prompt/InputBox just consists of a comment saying it isn't natively supported by PowerShell, as though they hadn't heard of Add-Type 'Microsoft.VisualBasic'; [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox() It's two lines. Come on. Not to mention it's a snippet saying "no input box support" inside an IDE whose biggest feature is a FORM BUILDER. Could they not include a snippet with a simple input box form here?
• It has a "Go to declaration" command for functions, but not variables.
• It has a command to transpose the current line down, but not up. Seriously?
• An absolutely abysmal lack of customization, including keyboard shortcuts and ribbon layout. Hope you like how the shortcuts are defined (where they exist, anyway), because you can't change them.
• When editing XAML, any syntax error while you're in the middle of editing causes an error to display in the output window which automatically displays and steals focus. It's beyond annoying and quite honestly unforgivable. This is horrible design.
• XAML preview in general. I realize there's a current feature to convert WinForms, but they're so different, not having a first-class editor is a giant con. Even the free and portable PSScriptPad, as buggy and in need of updating as that application is, offers a 1st-class WPF and XAML editor, as does the VS 2017/2019 edition of the PowerShell Pro Tools extension by the same developer.
• Help documents are very obviously parsed and generated using a custom template, which is fine, but still use what appears to be an embedded IE control instead of, say, a modern HTML renderer using the original (and up-to-date) documentation from the PowerShell repository, which contains both PS 5.1 and 7 documentation. I'd say that would be a far better source since they already contain formatting and links, unlike the local documentation (mostly for about_ files which are in desparate need of their own schema, or at least markdown).
• Help documents, specifically About topics, aren't parsed correctly. If the help is to be displayed with a custom template, then a number of things ought to (in my opinion, of course) be done:
  • Hard line breaks should be removed from pararaphs to allow the text to wrap to some percentage of the document width.
  • Parameters in the help viewer are stuck in tiny box elements instead of being allowed to flow the width of the document like everything else. Sapien's freeware Help Viewer doesn't format them in this annoying way, although that has its own host of issues rendering it unusable in my opinion. I assume there's an issue with the CSS or HTML template used because there is no earthly way this was intentional… I hope.
  • PLEASE implement either foldable regions in the Help viewer, or clickable breadcrumb links at the top, or an outline/TOC with anchor links for quickly getting to relevant information (similar to how the official Microsoft documentation works). Some help files are incredibly long, especially About topics, and having to scroll just to see the Examples section is horrible design, especially considering they're parsing and converting MAML to HTML using a custom template. Even the very old built-in UI for Get-Help -ShowWindow has the option of showing or hiding different sections.
• The application's built-in help just opens a PDF. What's going on there?

For all of the above reasons and more, I'd be wary about using this even if it was free, but it isn't. I'm not sure how it gained so much popularity, to be honest.