Generating Random RGB Colors in PowerShell

Windows Terminal is one of the best things Microsoft has shipped in years. Tabs, profiles, custom colors, pane splitting, GPU-accelerated text rendering.

Here’s a simple powershell function that

function nt {
    [cmdletbinding()]
    param(
        [string]$Directory = $env:USERPROFILE,
        [string]$RGB
    )
    # get RGB
    if([string]::isnullorempty($RGB)) {
        $rgb = "#{0:X6}" -f (Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 0x1000000)
    }
    # wt command    
    wt -w 0 nt -p 'Windows PowerShell' -d $Directory --title 'WinPowerShell' --tabColor $rgb
}

The wt command is the Windows Terminal CLI.

-w 0 targets the current window, nt opens a new tab, -p picks the profile, -d sets the starting directory, --title sets the title, obviously --tabColor helps to visually differentiate the tab from the others. This parameter accepts #RGB value in hex format #000000 to #FFFFFF.

This line is interesting:

$rgb = "#{0:X6}" -f (Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 16777216)

We’re using the format operator -f to format string "#{0:X6}"

X6 means hexadecimal value padded to 6 places using a random integer value from (Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 16777216)

Other ways to formulate this line:

Formatting three separate string:

'#{0:X2}{1:X2}{2:X2}' -f (Get-Random -Max 256),(Get-Random -Max 256),(Get-Random -Max 256)

Or shifting binary 1 to the left 24 places:

'#{0:X6}' -f (Get-Random (1 -shl 24))

Essentially, these are different ways to say: “give me random number which could be one of the possible 16,777,216 color values in a 24-bit RGB color space standard then format it as #RRGGBB”

I dont know… just something I personally found interesting.

Computers are amazing.