For the last few months, I’ve been getting more and more infuriated with my PowerShell sessions opening in a tiny raster font (4×6). On a high resolution display like the one on the Surface Pro 3, that’s a complete pain and, whilst I could change the font in the properties for that session, it wasn’t “sticky”, with an error that said:

Error Updating Shortcut

Unable to modify the shortcut: Check to make sure it has not been deleted or renamed.

For reference, I’m experiencing this on Windows 8.1, 64-bit and it only applies to the Windows PowerShell shortcut and the Microsoft Azure PowerShell shortcut – not to the PowerShell ISE, nor to the various shortcuts created by modules like the SharePoint Online Management Shell, Lync Server Management Shell or the Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell.

Solving the “stickiness” of my changes was simple enough – I asked our support team to change the permissions on the shortcut to allow Users to Modify it – but I still couldn’t get it to stay on my preferred setting: Lucida Console 20.

I could set it to Consolas, or raster fonts (urgh), but Lucida Console just wouldn’t stick. It’s been recorded as a bug in Microsoft Connect for a couple of years but there’s no sign of a fix yet (not even in Windows 10).

Being unable to set the default PowerShell font to Lucida Console seems to be a widely recognised problem. Various options are discussed on this SuperUser post including that it may be a language issue. Others have suggested the issue is the space in the font name, with a workaround that involves installing a new font and editing the registry (not an option for me without administrator permissions). I also looked at using the SetConsoleFont module to change the font within my PowerShell profile but struggled to work out the settings I would require.

In the end, I gave up and accepted that Consolas 24 is vastly preferable to a 4×6 raster font!