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

Terminal color schemes

Anyone who's tried to change their color scheme for the older conhost.exe terminal knows that it can be quite painful—the color schemes are split across multiple different files and the registry. Thankfully, in the new Windows Terminal, color schemes are represented by a single JSON object, living in our settings.json file. Because these color schemes are simple JSON, it's easy to create and share our own.

Color schemes can also be updated via the Settings UI (Ctrl + ,). However, it's easier to download, modify, and share color schemes using JSON, rather than clicking each color individually in the UI. For this reason, we'll be referring to the settings and configuration options by their JSON keys and values throughout this chapter.

Windows Terminal ships with some popular color schemes out of the box, such as Solarized and Tango. In addition, the easily shareable nature of the color schemes has led to a large community repository...