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 the command palette

The command palette, initially popularized by Visual Studio Code, also makes an appearance in Windows Terminal. It even uses the same keyboard shortcut as Visual Studio Code, Ctrl + Shift + P, so the muscle memory is transferable.

The command palette is a great way to discover commands in Windows Terminal. For example, pretend we forget how to duplicate a pane. We probably don't even remember the "duplicate" word; we just know we want to do something with a pane! Pressing Ctrl + Shift + P will open the command palette, and then typing the word pane will return all pane-related commands, including our forgotten Duplicate pane command:

Figure 2.9 – Using the command palette to find the "Duplicate pane" command

The best part about the command palette is that it shows the associated keyboard shortcuts for each command (Alt + Shift + D in our "Duplicate pane" example). It functions not only as...