Styled Output: Bash Commands, CSS-Styled Objects

This is where ps-bash’s two halves meet. Bash commands give you the muscle memory; the typed pipeline gives you real objects; and Format-Styled lets you paint those objects with actual CSS — selectors, classes, colors, weights, alignment — straight to your terminal.

ps aux | Format-Styled -Style ps
ls -la | Format-Styled -Style ls
ping example.com | Show-Styled          # full-screen, navigable, auto-themed

Same bash command in. Styled, structured output out. No awk '{print $1}' to fake columns, no ANSI escape-code soup — a stylesheet does it.

The idea: a stylesheet is a theme

Format-Styled treats every object like a tiny DOM node and runs a CSS cascade over it (powered by the Strata selector engine). It matches three things about each object:

CSS selector	Matches	Example
Kind { … }	The object’s type name, namespace stripped	Process, FileInfo, DirectoryInfo
#id { … }	The object’s Id then Name property	#PsBash.psm1
.class { … }	Labels from the object’s class property	.busy, .error, .dir

# Tag rows with a class, then style by class:
Get-Process |
  Select-Object *, @{ n='class'; e={ if ($_.CPU -gt 50) { 'busy' } } } |
  Format-Styled 'Process { color: grey }  .busy { color: red; font-weight: bold }' `
                -Property Name, Id, CPU

The -Css argument (alias -Style / -Stylesheet) accepts a built-in sheet name, an inline CSS string (anything containing { or a newline), or a path to a .css file. Omit it and you get the built-in default sheet.

Layout: list vs table, chosen for you

One object → list

A single object renders as a two-column property list (key / value). Force it with -List.

Many objects → table

Multiple objects render as a grid table with a header row. Force it with -Table.

Pick the columns and their order with -Property Name,Id,CPU; omit it and each row uses its own ToString(). The structural sheet (table.css / list.css) handles header weight, primary-column bold, and right-aligning numeric cells — without coloring data cells, so your semantic colors always win the cascade.

Built-in stylesheets

Ten sheets ship embedded in the cmdlet. Name them with -Style <name>:

Sheet	For	What it does
default	anything	Generic semantic palette: .error .warn .ok .info .muted .busy …
ls	ls output	DirectoryInfo bright-blue+bold, .dir .exe .symlink .hidden .archive
ps	ps output	.busy red+bold, .stuck yellow+strikethrough, .idle gray
table	grid structure	header bold+underline, .primary bold, .num right-aligned
list	property lists	.property-name cyan+bold
net	ping / traceroute	.ok under 80ms green, .slow under 200ms yellow, .high red+bold, .timeout strikethrough
fs	files (interactive)	adds open/cd buttons + size/dates/attrs/acl expansion
procsvc	processes (interactive)	adds stop/restart buttons + path/memory/threads expansion
object	any PSObject (interactive)	copy/inspect buttons + full property list
error	ErrorRecord (interactive)	dismiss button + stack/invocation/category

Supported CSS properties

Strata implements a focused, terminal-meaningful subset of CSS:

/* text (inherited) */
color: red | bright-cyan | #88ccff | transparent;   /* 16 ANSI names + hex */
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
text-decoration: underline | strikethrough | none;
text-align: left | right | center;

/* box */
background: blue;
overflow: visible | hidden | ellipsis;
padding: …;  margin: …;

/* layout */
display: block | flex | grid | none;
grid-template-columns: auto auto;
flex-direction: …;  justify-content: …;  align-items: …;  gap: …;

/* interactive sheets only */
command: "stop" when "key.s";   /* keybindings, inert in the static path */

Pseudo-classes :focused and :expanded apply in the interactive viewer.

Auto-theming: the right sheet, automatically

ps-bash’s network commands already emit typed objects carrying a latency class, so they theme themselves — ping picks the net sheet with no -Style needed:

ping example.com | Show-Styled        # green/yellow/red by latency, automatically

When you don’t name a sheet, Show-Styled auto-selects from the first row’s kind:

Object kind	Sheet
FileInfo / DirectoryInfo / FileSystemInfo	fs
Process / Service / ServiceController	procsvc
ErrorRecord	error
PingReply / TraceHop	net
anything else	object

Make it the default

Two environment switches route all PowerShell object output through styling — bash commands stay on their fast text path untouched:

$env:PSBASH_DEFAULT_FORMAT = 'styled'       # static ANSI everywhere (-c, pipe, file, REPL)
$env:PSBASH_DEFAULT_FORMAT = 'interactive'  # full-screen viewer in a TTY, static string otherwise

styled works in every mode and never blocks; interactive only opens the full-screen viewer when a real terminal is present and only at end-of-pipeline, so it can’t interrupt interleaved text. Either way, each path falls back to stock formatting on any failure — your data is never lost to a styling error.

Bring your own theme

Drop a .css file with a built-in’s name to extend it (cascade — your rules win), searched in order:

1. $PSBASH_STYLE_PATH — a directory or PATH-separated list of directories
2. ~/.config/ps-bash/styles/
3. ~/.psbash/styles/

/* ~/.config/ps-bash/styles/ps.css — extend the built-in ps sheet */
.busy   { color: bright-red; font-weight: bold; }
.idle   { color: #555555; }
Process { color: bright-white; }

You don’t recopy the whole sheet — your file appends after the built-in, so you only write the rules you want to change.

Strata: the engine underneath

Format-Styled and Show-Styled are thin shells over Strata, a sibling CSS-cascade-for-terminals engine. The pipeline is:

PowerShell objects
  → PsObjectTreeAdapter   (wrap objects as a styled node tree, kind/id/class)
  → Cascade               (match selectors, resolve specificity + inheritance)
  → SpectreProjection     (project to Spectre.Console)
  → ANSI text             (one string for static; a repaint loop for interactive)

Note

Strata isn’t on NuGet — it’s consumed from a local package feed (../strata/local-feed, gated by UseStrata=true in the build). The Format-Styled / Show-Styled cmdlets are the public, cross-platform surface; you never touch Strata directly.

Cross-platform and CI-safe

• ANSI everywhere — output is one Spectre-rendered ANSI string, handed to PowerShell’s host. Works in -c, pipes, files, and the REPL on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• NO_COLOR honored — set NO_COLOR and Format-Styled emits plain text, no escapes.
• Width-aware — it probes the host window width and falls back gracefully when there isn’t one (redirected output, CI).

Tip

Format-Styled is static — perfect for logs, CI, and -c. For a keyboard-navigable, expandable view of the same objects, see Interactive TUIs (Show-Styled and browse).