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

Introducing the settings.json file

Windows Terminal uses a JSON file, named settings.json, for its underlying configuration store. This text-based format benefits the Windows Terminal development team by allowing them to rapidly iterate and release new settings. Additionally, it benefits users in that it can be stored in version control and easily synchronized across computers.

While there is ongoing work to create a UI for modifying these settings, as of 2021, the UI is undergoing rapid change, and does not currently support all the available settings. This book will generally refer to settings using the JSON keys and values, as they are unambiguous, less likely to change, and easier to copy/paste from the digital edition of the book. Additionally, a great deal of effort has gone into supporting a high-quality JSON editing experience. Let's test it out!

We can open the settings.json file by selecting the Settings menu item from the drop-down menu, and then selecting Open...