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

We started this chapter with an overview of how to bridge the gap between Windows and Linux with WSL2's interoperability features. This allows us to seamlessly share both files and commands between these two operating systems.

We then reviewed how to install and update software in Ubuntu, so we can greatly increase the amount of software at our fingertips. With both the Windows 10 platform and the Ubuntu package repository available to us, we'll be able to install almost any piece of software available!

Then, we discussed the concept of alternate shells, and selected ZSH to replace our default shell. We learned how to use ZSH effectively with command substitutions, aliases, suffix aliases, and functions. Finally, we covered using oh-my-zsh's plugins to add useful features including autosuggestions, syntax highlighting, and more.

In our next few chapters, we'll focus on optimizing common developer and DevOps workflows so we can move quickly and effortlessly...