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 GitHub from Windows Terminal

GitHub is an excellent website for software collaboration. GitHub provides hosting for Git repositories, as well as web-based project management tools such as bug trackers and software release management.

One downside is that many of its features, such as Pull Requests, are web-based. This generally requires us to point and click on the website, and switch back and forth between a browser and a terminal. This back-and-forth switching can get annoying and inefficient.

GitHub has an official command-line client called gh. As of 2020, this tool is showing promise, but it's far from a full-fledged replacement for using the website. That being said, it's still useful in certain scenarios, which we'll cover in this section.

Specifically, we'll cover the following command-line workflows:

  • Creating repositories
  • Viewing pull requests
  • Checking out pull request branches

gh supports many additional features,...