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

Chapter 10: Using Git and GitHub with Windows Terminal

Throughout this book, we've been using a great deal of open source software, such as Windows Terminal, PowerShell, and ZSH. These three projects all have something in common: they use Git as their version control system (VCS) to manage their source code.

Git is the most popular version control system, as it's fast, flexible, and distributed. Its distributed nature is in contrast to older client/server systems such as Subversion (SVN), where the server has all the smarts, and the clients are dependent on it. With Git, each copy of the source code is a fully working repository with a complete history of the code, and can itself act as a server if required. Whether or not there's a central copy in Git is more of a social or project management construct, rather than a technical one.

Somewhat ironically, one of the most popular ways to use Git is in a centralized manner, with GitHub and GitLab being the common hosts...