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

Useful Global Settings

Global settings control the parts of Windows Terminal that are common across all shells, like the tab UI and window settings. In this section, we'll explore some of the more interesting global settings:

  • The copyOnSelect option, which defaults to false, will enable or disable automatically copying text to the clipboard immediately when the text is selected. Setting this to true works nicely with the right-click to paste functionality built into Windows Terminal.
  • The startOnUserLogin option, which defaults to false, controls whether or not the terminal launches automatically when a user logs in to Windows 10.
  • The defaultProfile option allows us to specify which shell is the default when we start Windows Terminal, or open a new pane or tab. We'll cover this setting in detail in the next section of this chapter.
  • The confirmCloseAllTabs option, which defaults to true, will enable or disable the following dialog that shows when closing...