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 PowerShell Core

The first step to using PowerShell is to upgrade it! By default, Windows 10 comes with Windows PowerShell 5, while the latest version is PowerShell Core version 7. PowerShell Core is a modern, fast, and open source version of PowerShell, and was initially released in August 2016. It's now a stable, complete alternative to Windows PowerShell 5.

PowerShell Core runs alongside Windows PowerShell 5, so there's no risk to installing it. Windows PowerShell 5 can still be used to run any existing, older scripts, while PowerShell Core can be used as the day-to-day shell in Windows Terminal.

PowerShell Core has several benefits over Windows PowerShell 5:

  • Cross-platform and open source: In addition to Windows, PowerShell Core works on both macOS and Linux and is MIT licensed.
  • Faster performance: Both initialization and module loading are faster. Anecdotally, shell initialization is almost twice as fast as PowerShell 5.
  • More language...