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

Using actions for visual effects

Windows Terminal currently has several hidden commands for managing visual effects. These commands are likely to be used rarely, but let's explore them anyway.

setColorScheme

From our example at the beginning of the chapter, we found that setColorScheme is an available action, with a colorScheme parameter. It does not have an associated keyboard shortcut. If we wanted to change our Windows Terminal color scheme with a keyboard shortcut (for example, Ctrl + Alt + S), we could add the following configuration:

{
  "command": {
    "action": "setColorScheme",
    "colorScheme": "Solarized Light"
  },
  "keys": "ctrl+alt+s"
},

This can be useful to switch between the light and dark modes of the same theme, for example, Solarized Light and Solarized Dark. Each theme could be associated with a separate...