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 Microsoft Azure's Cloud Shell and az interactive

In this section, we'll learn how to use Windows Terminal with Microsoft Azure, one of the top cloud providers used by many organizations, both on the Windows platform and beyond. Microsoft Azure has a generous free tier of 12 months, with some restrictions. In this section, we'll use free-tier resources when integrating Microsoft Azure into Windows Terminal.

Some of the work is already done for us; when we installed Windows Terminal, an Azure Cloud Shell profile was automatically created:

Figure 14.1 – Azure Cloud Shell available in Windows Terminal

If the Azure Cloud Shell menu option is not available in Windows Terminal, first ensure that it's not set to hidden (in Windows Terminal, find the Azure Cloud Shell profile and ensure "hidden": true is not set). The full profile definition is as follows:

{
  "guid": "{b453ae62-4e3d-5e58-b989...