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

Testing our REST API

To test our REST API from Windows Terminal, we can install another dotnet tool: Microsoft's HTTP REPL. This tool allows any HTTP API to be tested, regardless of the server-side technology. To install it, run the following command in a new Windows Terminal PowerShell pane:

dotnet tool install -g Microsoft.dotnet-httprepl

We can then launch the tool by running the httprepl command, as seen in the following screenshot. The tool will launch in a Disconnected mode, and we can connect to our API by typing the command connect <url>, where the URL is our REST API's address (for example, https://localhost:5001).

Once we've connected, we can use ls to view available resources (like our WeatherForecast) and type cd to navigate to them. Once we've navigated to our WeatherForecast resource, we can type GET to run an HTTP GET command. This will call our API and return the result:

Figure 12.8 – Calling our /WeatherForecast...