Book Image

Windows Terminal Tips, Tricks, and Productivity Hacks

By : Will Fuqua
5 (1)
Book Image

Windows Terminal Tips, Tricks, and Productivity Hacks

5 (1)
By: Will Fuqua

Overview of this book

Windows Terminal is a new and open-source command-line application for Windows 10, built for the Command Prompt, PowerShell, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and more. It's fast, modern, and configurable thanks to its GPU-accelerated rendering, excellent UTF-8 support, and JSON-based configurability, and this book can help you learn how to leverage these features. You’ll start by learning the benefits of Windows Terminal and its open-source development, as well as how to use the built-in tabs, panes, and key bindings to build your own efficient terminal workflows. After you’ve mastered Windows Terminal, this book shows how to use and configure PowerShell Core and the Windows Subsystem for Linux within Windows Terminal. You’ll maximize your productivity using powerful tools such as PSReadLine for PowerShell and ZSH on Linux, and discover useful tips and tricks for common developer tools like Git and SSH. Finally, you’ll see how Windows Terminal can be used in common development and DevOps tasks, such as developing frontend JavaScript applications and backend REST APIs, and managing cloud-based systems like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. By the end of this book, you'll not only be well-versed with Windows Terminal, but also have learned how to effectively use shells like PowerShell Core and ZSH to become proficient at the command line.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introducing the New Windows Terminal
5
Section 2: Configuring your Windows Terminal and its shells
12
Section 3: Using your Windows Terminal for development

Chapter 8: Tips for using PowerShell like a Pro

Up until this point in the book, we've focused on using Windows Terminal to its fullest potential. From this point on, we'll switch focus to mastering the shells inside Windows Terminal. In this chapter, we will fine-tune PowerShell, the most popular shell on Windows 10, into a first-class command-line experience. Future chapters will focus on WSL2 and performing common frontend, backend, and DevOps tasks efficiently.

There are two parts to PowerShell: the command-line shell and the full-featured scripting language. In this chapter, we will cover only the command-line shell portion. We will not cover the scripting language in depth as it is a large topic that could fill multiple books (and has!).

We'll cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Installing PowerShell Core
  • Using built-in commands and aliases
  • Configuring PSReadLine in PowerShell Core
  • Adding GNU coreutils to the path
  • Installing...