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Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is a terminal application to access shells such as PowerShell, WSL distributions, and SSH all in one place.

It can be customized aesthetically and functionally to the moon:

  • Aesthetically, there are countless resources online to serve as a starting point.
  • Functionality, I went through each setting and customized them based on what I was familiar with (Ubuntu terminal, keybindings from my Vim configuration).

Showcase

This is what my Windows Terminal configuration looked like when I was still using the setup repository. Currently my configuration looks a lot more like my Unix terminal configuration.

Windows Terminal Demo

Setup

  1. Install a Nerd Font

    • The fonts I use can be found in windows/fonts/ of my setup repository (currently I only use FiraCode)

  2. My settings, themes, and profiles can be found in reference_dotfiles/windows_terminal/windows_terminal_settings.json of the dotfiles repository

    • The icons I use can be found in windows/icons/ of my setup repository

Shortcuts

I have highlighted a few of the shortcuts that I regularly use. The shortcuts with the "Similarity" column italicized are ones that I modified from their default values. All the available shortcuts are listed in the Actions tab of the settings page.

Shortcut Description Similarity
Ctrl+W Close pane Microsoft Edge
Ctrl+Shift+W Close window Microsoft Edge
Alt+Shift+D Duplicate pane
Ctrl+Shift+D Duplicate tab
Alt + J / H / L / K Move focus down/left/right/up My tmux setup
Ctrl+Tab Next tab Microsoft Edge
Ctrl+Shift+Space Open new tab dropdown
Ctrl+Shift + # Switch to tab, index:#
Ctrl+Shift+P Toggle command palette VS Code

I also removed some default shortcuts:

Shortcut Description Conflict
Ctrl+V Copy text Vim visual block mode
Ctrl+C Paste Unix interrupt signal

What are panes?

A tab can be split into multiple panes, enabling you to run commands right next to each other. Check out the documentation page on panes to learn more.

Resources