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

Adding a Node.js profile to Windows Terminal

Node.js can run our code in two different ways: by reading JavaScript code inside files, or by processing JavaScript code in an interactive session. We'll explore the former way later in the chapter as we build our application, and explore the latter way now. The interactive session lets us evaluate JavaScript statements for quick experimentation, similar to a shell. We can add this as a tab or pane in Windows Terminal:

Figure 11.2 – Experimenting with JavaScript in an interactive Node.js session

This can be useful to get instant feedback about JavaScript in the Node.js environment; we can define and iterate on functions, play around with JavaScript syntax, better understand APIs, and more!

The tricky part here is that we installed Node.js in Ubuntu, and we want to access it as a Windows Terminal tab, which is a Windows 10 application. To bridge this gap, we can use the wsl utility that we covered...