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

Command Prompt customization

Command Prompt does not have nearly as many customization options available as PowerShell and ZSH, so this section will be briefer! Luckily, most of our work was done when we set up our settings.json earlier in the chapter—Command Prompt will respect those color scheme settings.

The one thing we can customize in Command Prompt is the prompt itself. We can run the prompt command to change it temporarily and set the PROMPT environment variable to change it permanently.

The prompt can use ANSI escape sequences similar to the escape sequences we covered as part of the previous PowerShell section. In addition, it has special variables for placeholders such as the date and time. Run prompt /? to see a list of all available special variables. We'll be using the following special variables:

  • $E for color escape codes
  • $T for the current time
  • $P for the current path
  • $C / $F for opening and closing parentheses, respectively
  • ...