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

Configuring PSReadLine in PowerShell Core

The PSReadLine PowerShell module is critical to set up. It controls many aspects of the command-line editing experience, including accepting input, providing hotkeys, and various algorithms for autocompletion. It strives to provide a good experience out of the box and provides many configuration settings for fine-tuning its behavior.

PSReadLine is so important that Windows 10 started bundling it as part of PowerShell. However, the bundled version can quickly get out of date, and it's worth updating to get the newest features and fixes.

In this section, we'll update the PSReadLine module and install two additional modules: posh-git and oh-my-posh. We covered all three of these modules from a UI and theming perspective in Chapter 5, Changing your Windows Terminal appearance; in this section, we'll dive deeper into the features that PSReadLine provides. As a summary, these three modules can be activated in PowerShell Core...