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 AWS from Windows Terminal

In this section, we'll set up an AWS account, experiment with the aws-shell command-line UI, and explore the AWS Tools for PowerShell.

AWS also has a cloud shell, similar to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Unfortunately, AWS CloudShell is browser-only for now and does not yet expose a programmatic interface that we can use to integrate it into Windows Terminal. As we can only use it from the browser, we won't be covering it in this book. Instead, we'll cover several useful command-line tools.

Before we get started, we'll need to create a free AWS account and generate some AWS access keys; our tools will use these access keys to interact with the AWS API on our behalf:

  1. Sign up for an AWS account at https://aws.amazon.com/.
  2. After the account is created, navigate to the AWS Console.
  3. Go to the top-right account menu, as shown in Figure 14.10, and select My Security Credentials.
  4. Generate new access keys. This...