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

Discovering unbound actions

The hidden actions in Windows Terminal can be hard to find. Ultimately, as Windows Terminal is open source, we can always read through the source code to find them, but that is a lengthy process given the number of actions involved. Most of these actions are listed in the command palette, but it's hard to discover them if we don't know what to type!

The first stop for finding actions should be Microsoft's documentation, available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/customize-settings/actions. The Windows Terminal team does a great job of keeping this up to date. However, even this documentation doesn't list all the actions available.

Luckily, Windows Terminal ships with a JSON schema. The schema is used to validate that the settings.json file is well-formed, and also to power Visual Studio Code's autocompletion.

The JSON schema file can be found by opening settings.json (Ctrl + Shift + ,) and navigating...