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

Installing Node.js in WSL2

Node.js is a popular JavaScript runtime environment, and can be used for both backend and frontend development. In this chapter we'll be using it for frontend development; it will manage our library dependencies, compile and check our code, and provide modern developer tools that will help us build applications.

We'll be installing Node.js on Ubuntu, under WSL2. While Node.js development is perfectly possible on Windows and PowerShell, it can lead to dependency headaches with packages like node_gyp and SASS. By using WSL2, we'll avoid these issues, and demonstrate how to develop with Windows Terminal and WSL2. The patterns we cover here will extend to developing in other programming languages on WSL2 as well. In Chapter 12, Building REST APIs with C# and Windows Terminal, we'll cover a Windows and PowerShell development workflow with Windows Terminal.

While Node.js is available in the standard Ubuntu package repositories, it tends...