How to Bring Program to the Front with Powershell

The aim of this page📝 is to illustrate bringing a program’s window to the front with a simple command from Powershell. Here is a particular code from my $profile, mainly for jumping into the VLC player, where I listen to BBC essential mix for routine tasks and don’t want to use WIN+<number> as that’s already reserved for other tasks and I don’t want to restart instances if I am listening to 2-hour mix that which I am pausing and unpausing, etc.

Pavol Kutaj

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Oct 12, 2023

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• In PowerShell, you can get a list of running processes using the Get-Process cmdlet.
• Once you have access to a process, you can read its properties or call its methods to perform various actions.
• However, some actions require interacting with the Windows API, which is not directly accessible from PowerShell.
• For example, bringing a running program’s window to the front requires calling the SetForegroundWindow function from the user32.dll library.
• To call this function from PowerShell, you need to use the Add-Type cmdlet to define a new class with a static extern method for SetForegroundWindow.
• Then, you can call this method with the handle of the program’s main window as an argument.
• The handle of the main window can be obtained from the MainWindowHandle property of the process.

CODE

• I know goto is a provocative name given the history of the phrase
• I am still testing this, using it with SingleInstance, just take it as an inspiration

function goto ($process_name) {
    Add-Type @"
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
public class Program {
    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
    public static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);
}
"@

    $processes = Get-Process -Name "*${process_name}*"
    $process = $processes | Where-Object { $_.MainWindowHandle -ne 0 } | Select-Object -First 1
    if ($process) {
        $hwnd = $process.MainWindowHandle
        [Program]::SetForegroundWindow($hwnd)
    } else {
        Write-Host "Program is not running or does not have a MainWindowHandle."
    }}