The Get-Help Cmdlet is great for showing information about Cmdlets, but there are also the About Topics with conceptual help to better help you understand how PowerShell works. In this small blog post, I will show you how to query and use them.
What are About topics?
“Conceptual help articles in PowerShell begin with about_, such as about_Comparison_Operators. To see all about_ articles, type Get-Help about_*. To see a particular article, type Get-Help about_<article-name>, such as Get-Help about_Comparison_Operators.”
What topics are there?
In my local PowerShell v7.6 installation, there are 155 About Topics available. This number depends on the number of modules with About_ help information available; it may differ on your system, depending on the modules or features you have installed. To get an overview of the available ones, you can use Get-Help About_* to display them:
Note: You might miss out on quite a few if you never ran Update-Help, so do that and see if you have more afterward. For example, my Windows Server 2025 had 149 before running Update-Help (Ignore UI Culture errors, if any, while updating), and had 321(!) afterward 🙂
It’s a pretty long list, but you can also find the basic/general ones listed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about?view=powershell-7.6
How to get information about a specific Topic
When running Get-Help About_Try_Catch_Finally, for example, the complete help output is displayed in the Terminal window at once. But depending on the Topic, it could also stop after showing x lines, with a — More — link at the bottom. You can then press Space to go to the next page, Enter to go to the next line, or Q to stop displaying information. (Pressing H will show you help information; on macOS/Linux, this help is longer and allows you to search the information.)
By running the Get-Help Cmdlet, or Help as its alias, you can read information about Cmdlets in the Terminal itself without having to switch to your browser. Easy and without using the mouse, always a win 😉
You can also just type About_Try_Catch_Finally and hit F1 (Or Fn+F1) to automatically display the help information about the Topic in a browsable Windows inside your Terminal (Up Arrow, Down Arrow, and Q to quit)
Note: This works for every Cmdlet in your Terminal, place your cursor on it and hit F1 or Fn+F1.
Wrapping up
And that’s about the existence of the About Topics and how to query them from within the Terminal (Or by using the link mentioned above in the second chapter). Have a lovely weekend!