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 11: Building web applications with React

In this chapter, we'll see how Windows Terminal can be used in modern development workflows. We'll build a small web application using React, a popular frontend JavaScript framework from Facebook. Windows Terminal will be one of the main tools in our toolbox.

We'll be using the experience we gained in previous chapters to both develop and run our application on Ubuntu in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). We're using Ubuntu because many JavaScript libraries tend to treat Windows 10 as an unfortunate second-class citizen, with Windows-specific issues remaining unfixed. We'll sidestep any compatibility issues with Windows 10 by using WSL2, and have a first-class development experience.

To keep this chapter concise and to the point, we won't be including a full tutorial on React, though we will explain some basic concepts along the way. The principles and techniques we cover in this chapter are generalizable...