Man do i love the new Windows Terminal!

I can’t overstate how much this helps in moving from Linux to Windows. I’m able to have cmd, powershell and wsl in the same terminal, move between panes with vim Key bindings, manage them similar to a tiling wm (minus moving panes) and have all of that work flawlessly (mostly) together with nice visual identification of what’s where. Plus they finally support proper terminal color schemes! And per profile at that.

To make this post a little more “productive”, here are some of the settings stuff that might be interesting:

A Profile to start an SSH Session to a specific server:

{
            "acrylicOpacity" : 0.85000002384185791,
            "closeOnExit" : true,
            "colorScheme" : "PaperColor",
            "commandline" : "ssh nuser@*IPAdress* -i *PathtoPrivatekey*",
            "cursorColor" : "#FFFFFF",
            "cursorShape" : "bar",
            "fontFace" : "Fira Code",
            "fontSize" : 12,
            "guid" : "{0caa0dad-35be-5f56-a8ff-afceeeaa6102}",
            "historySize" : 9001,
            "icon" : "*Path to Icon*",
            "name" : "Nagios",
            "padding" : "0, 0, 0, 0",
            "snapOnInput" : true,
            "startingDirectory" : "%USERPROFILE%",
            "useAcrylic" : true,
            "backgroundImage": "*PathToBackgroundimage*"
        }

My current Colorscheme based on PaperColor

> {
>             "background" : "#1C1C1C",
>             "black" : "#1C1C1C",
>             "blue" : "#5FAFD7",
>             "brightBlack" : "#585858",
>             "brightBlue" : "#5FAFD7",
>             "brightCyan" : "#00AFAF",
>             "brightGreen" : "#AFD700",
>             "brightPurple" : "#AF87D7",
>             "brightRed" : "#FF5FAF",
>             "brightWhite" : "#D0D0D0",
>             "brightYellow" : "#AFD700",
>             "cyan" : "#D7875F",
>             "foreground" : "#D0D0D0",
>             "green" : "#AFD700",
>             "name" : "PaperColor",
>             "purple" : "#AF87D7",
>             "red" : "#AF005F",
>             "white" : "#D0D0D0",
>             "yellow" : "#D7AF5F"
>         },

The Keybindings for Pane management:

        {
            "command" : "moveFocusDown",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+j"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "moveFocusLeft",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+h"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "moveFocusRight",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+l"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "moveFocusUp",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+k"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "resizePaneDown",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+j"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "resizePaneLeft",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+h"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "resizePaneRight",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+l"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "resizePaneUp",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+k"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "splitHorizontal",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+up"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "splitVertical",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+left"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "splitHorizontal",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+down"
            ]
        },
        {
            "command" : "splitVertical",
            "keys" : 
            [
                "alt+shift+right"
            ]
        },

And for those interested, the background images in 1080p:




If you feel like it, share your thoughts on the new terminal, configurations you use or just random stuff about it.

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Gotta say I’m not the biggest fan of it due to it being a UWP app, they are so slow IMO so the input latency drives me insane

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I know what you mean. It’s still beta, so there’s a lot of work to be done. So far, it’s better than most stuff i tested on windows. Sure, it doesn’t come close to some of the Linux alternatives, but it’s better than nothing.
Plus, it’s on github. There’s active development going on in the open, so it’s possible to work on such Problems. The 0.2 to 0.3 update brought some major improvements. So i’m pretty confident, that it’ll get better soon.

You are God Tier, my friend. I experimented with it a month or two ago and I really enjoyed working with it. What I wish would happen is they would have all of the WSL + PowerShells out of the box, but it seems like you have to install them first.

Love the color scheme and font, too.

They’ve gotten a lot better, don’t be too harsh yet because of your past experience! :wink: For example, I know everyone hates Electron apps but VS Code is snappy and fast compared to other applications.

Same. They’ve done really good work. Unfortunately, my job has me stuck on 1709 for the foreseeable future :confused: – But I have a VM with 1903 to work around it :wink: Plus Debian and CentOS VMs when WSL is too slow.

I think the Windows Terminal is another cornerstone in the Microsoft <3 Developers (developers, developers, developers, developers!) movement. Apple dropped the ball in a big way and MS is filling the void, quick. Hell, anecdotally, most I know with Apple products are deploying to Azure, so it’s still a win for Microsoft, lmao.

2 Likes

Not sure. With 0.2 i had to configure the WSL myself. With the pdate to 0.3, with a clean config it showed up imidiately. Might be that i installed WSL after installing the Terminal intially or such.
Currently, the SSH Profile is the only one i’ve added. CMD, PowerShell, Azure and WSL where there out of the box with the latest update.

I firmly believe that almost no toolkit is inherently Slow. No Developer designs stuff to be intentionally slow. Newer Toolkits just make it way easier to be lazy with stuff. The influx in high end CPU’s and more RAM also leads to Dev’s not caring as much for system resources as they used to. YYou can make fast Applications in almost any language or toolkit.

3 Likes

My current go to is Alacritty for Windows which is awesome latency wise and gpu accelerated, and since you are moving from Linux to Windows I suggest you check out https://scoop.sh it is awesome for installing various tools via command line and keeping them up to date

Nah, i’m not a big fan of those things.
I’m rather firm in Powershell and with Debian as WSL added, i can get to anything i’d ever need. To be fair, WSL replicates 99% of what i’d do in a linux Terminal in Windows. No need to install additional tools or such.

I tried Alacritty under Linux but never jived with it. It always either messed with my fonts or wasn’t quite right in some way. The amount of alternatives under Linux never made me consider it more. I might give it another try under Windows now. I never thought about it being available for Windows.

You can script scoop with powershell, which can be rather useful, especially for initial setups of new Windows installs, I have script that installs scoop and then installs everything listed in the image afterwards and I’m ready to work :smiley:

Edit: WSL is definitely required tho for development since database installs are so much better on Linux compared to Windows where the installers are so god damn bad and uninstallers barely work for databases…

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Hey man, how did you get the tiling windows in the same shell?

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Its baked into the new Terminal now. You can define a command in the Setting for “splitHorizontal” and “splitVertical”. Plus you can bind resizePane{Up,Down,Left,Right}. A new Pane will Always have the default Profile.

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Oh, the second code snippet you posted

Jesus, I’m an idiot asshole. You should have RTFM’d me :joy:

Thanks for being a standup guy :wink:

#windowsusersunite

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Retro effects and search coming soon.

Does Powershell or Command Prompt have command history yet?

This was included out of the box with version 1.

@eden had an incredible discovery

image

Add

"experimental.retroTerminalEffect": true,

to your profile.

10/10

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Microsoft have some great product blogs i forgot to check up on. Windows Terminal has had some nice improvements

I also like the text based settings for profiles :heart:

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I’ll be blatantly stealing some of this so I can be the envy of everyone at work!

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I need this.

Once I figure out how to create a profile.

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The drop down there’s a settings option opens up the terminals settings which is all just text including the profiles. Just copy a profile block and past it on the new line.

Sweet, got it working. Thanks!

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