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

Installing Ubuntu Linux

Installing Ubuntu on WSL2 has two main steps. First, we'll enable the WSL2 system on our computer. Second, we'll choose the Ubuntu distribution to install in WSL2. While we will cover the basic steps here, the most up-to-date instructions and troubleshooting information can always be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10.

Microsoft is currently working on streamlining the first step by adding a wsl --install command, which can be run from Windows Terminal with administrator privileges. Until that's ready, though, we'll need to manually install WSL2 by following Step 1.

Step 1: Install WSL2

First, we'll enable the required Windows 10 features. From the start menu, search for Turn Windows Features on or off and then enable two features, the Virtual Machine Platform and the Windows Subsystem for Linux:

Figure 3.1 – Adding the two Windows features required for WSL2

Once...