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

WSL2 customization with oh-my-zsh

The same theming configuration that we did for PowerShell is also available for WSL2! The settings.json changes will apply automatically; all we need to specify is our prompt. We have three options:

  1. oh-my-posh v3 – This is the same project we covered in the previous section. It's cross-platform!
  2. oh-my-zsh – This was the original oh-my project, originally released for the ZSH shell.
  3. oh-my-bash – The same as oh-my-zsh but for the Bash shell.

As we've already covered option 1 in the previous PowerShell section, we'll now cover option 2, oh-my-zsh. We won't be covering oh-my-bash, as it's very similar to the oh-my-zsh project.

The ZSH shell is a popular, alternative shell for Linux that replaces the default Bash shell. We'll cover it in depth and see the many productivity boosts available in Chapter 9, Tips for using Ubuntu like an Expert, but for now, we'll just cover the...