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

Choosing your shell

One of the biggest productivity enhancements we can make to our Ubuntu installation is changing the default shell. Ubuntu comes with the Bash shell by default, which is speedy and perfectly usable. We can increase our productivity, however, by choosing either the Z shell (ZSH) or fish shell. Both of these shells provide better out-of-the-box experiences than Bash.

ZSH is one of the most popular shells on Linux, and is the default shell on macOS since Catalina. It has 30 years of history, is highly configurable, and has a strong community with a large set of community-created themes and customizations. We first learned about ZSH in Chapter 5, Changing your Windows Terminal appearance, where we used the oh-my-zsh project to modernize our terminal's look. That just barely scratched the surface of the configurability and flexibility of ZSH; we'll learn more about it in the following sections.

Also worth mentioning is the fish shell; this shell has grown...