Ever tried changing the font of a PowerShell console to Lucida Console, only to see the setting gone the next time you open the console? In that case, you’re not alone! I’ve been pulling my hair over this problem many times but today I decided to investigate it further.
There are several different solutions and none of them worked for me. For some people it helps if you set the font size to something other than 12 points, but not for me. For others it helps to start the console as administrator, but not for me. And here’s a strange thing: In a good old Command Prompt (CMD.EXE) Lucida Console works as a default font with no problem at all. It’s only in PowerShell console I can’t set it as default.A few of these tricks are discussed at superuser.com.
My problem turned out to be different as it was related to the regional settings of my Windows installations. The problem is described very briefly by a Microsoft support engineer here. Apparently Lucide Console “is not properly supported on CJK languages and other languages that are not localized by PowerShell (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, etc.)”. It seems that Swedish belongs to the same category of languages that for some reason is not deemed compatible with Lucida Console. Strange thing is that it works perfectly when setting it on the console instance…
Anyway, to fix the problem all I had to do was to change my system locale to “English (United States)”:
Setting system locale to a language that is “supported” for Lucida Console solves the problem…
Voila, my PowerShell prompt is pretty everytime I open it, instead of using the ugly “Raster Fonts” which it falled back to before.
The problem description that Lucida Console is not compatible with all languages makes very little sense to me, but at least my problem is solved.
/Emil