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

Using Ubuntu with Windows

WSL2 is technically a lightweight virtual machine. While virtual machines are historically partitioned off from their host operating system, WSL2 provides some useful ways to transfer both data and commands across that boundary, making it easier and faster to accomplish our goals by combining the strengths of Windows and Linux.

Accessing Linux directories from Windows

From time to time, we'll want to transfer files from our Windows system to our Linux system. For example, maybe we have a large text file we want to ingest into a Linux command-line tool for further processing.

WSL2 creates a locally restricted network share for each installed distribution, under the \\wsl$ prefix. For example, our Ubuntu filesystem root is available under the \\wsl$\Ubuntu\ network path:

Figure 9.1 – WSL2 creates a network share that exposes our Linux filesystems to Windows

Using Windows Explorer, we can move, copy, and edit our...