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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to use the basic PowerShell Core command line to the fullest, using useful variables such as $$ and $^, and commands such as cd -, cd +, ii, h, and r. We also learned about PowerShell functions and pipelines.

After that, we turbocharged our editing experience with PSReadLine and created a full-featured, programmable PowerShell prompt. Luckily, there's very little we need to program ourselves—we can make use of the existing modules and configurations available from the community.

Additionally, we learned how to access coreutils from our PowerShell prompt. This gives us access to a large, popular suite of command-line tools that excel at manipulating text and solving problems.

Finally, we installed the z utility, which allows us to navigate around the filesystem at warp speed.

Now that we can run PowerShell like a pro, let's jump into the next chapter, where we will do the same for Linux on WSL2.