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

Developing in WSL2

So far, our WSL2 experience has been mostly text-based—fitting for a book on Windows Terminal! While this has served us nicely so far, in this section we'll explore using Visual Studio Code as our code editor and debugger, alongside Windows Terminal.

This presents an interesting challenge. Microsoft's guidance is to prefer editing files on the Linux filesystem with Linux applications, as this has the fastest filesystem performance. We would be at a disadvantage if we tried to use Visual Studio Code from Windows 10. It might work, but it'd be a slower and more frustrating experience.

We can fix this by using Microsoft's Remote - WSL extension for Visual Studio Code. This extension automatically installs a server into our WSL2 environment, which interacts with our Linux filesystem. Visual Studio Code on Windows 10 then uses a local port to communicate with this server. This process is shown in the following diagram:

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