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

Chapter 5: Changing your Windows Terminal appearance

Continuing our foray into Windows Terminal customization, let's take a deep dive into changing the terminal's appearance. Broadly, there are two main parts to this customization, both of which we'll cover in this chapter: customizing Windows Terminal's UI and color scheme, and shell-specific customizations that use this color scheme.

Customizing the UI and color scheme can be done entirely via the settings.json file, which we learned about in the previous chapter. In this chapter, we'll cover the schemes section of this file, which controls the color schemes, as well as some custom options in the profiles section for changing fonts, translucency, and more. We'll also cover where to download community color schemes, and how to write our own.

When customizing each shell, the steps are a bit more varied; each shell has its own customization options and libraries. We'll cover some useful options...