Post

Playing with the New Windows Terminal

Draft updated on Invalid Date
    Default avatar

    By Chris on Code

    Playing with the New Windows Terminal

    This tutorial is out of date and no longer maintained.

    Introduction

    The new Windows Terminal was just released in Preview capacity. You’ll need the latest Windows May Update to download it.

    I was excited to hear about the new Windows Terminal as it brings a big improvement over the default cmd and Powershell experiences.

    • Zooming
    • Tabs
    • GPU powered
    • Emoji support

    Current Setup: Hyper and WSL

    I was excited to try this new Terminal out as a great new built-in tool. Currently, I’m using Hyper as my terminal. I’m also using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) v1 and Ubuntu as my shell.

    Current Setup Bottlenecks

    With this setup, I can have a Linux setup on my Windows. While this setup is great, there have been some times where I notice performance isn’t as fast as it would be on a Linux or Mac. I’m looking forward to Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 which promises to greatly improve performance.

    Another bottleneck is that Hyper is built on web technologies HTML/CSS/JS so it’s not exactly a native application. Graphical performance may be a little slower.

    The new Windows Terminal comes with all the modern bells and whistles along with the performance of a native app.

    Installation and Tour

    The new Windows Terminal can be installed from the Windows Store: https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N0DX20HK701

    Once installed, just go into your Start menu and open it up!

    Tabs and Creating New Shells

    We are able to create tabs!

    We are able to click on the dropdown and create new shells from the list:

    Important Settings

    Let’s experiment with configuring this a little bit. If we open up settings, we can see that everything is currently configured in a profiles.json file.

    We can configure things like:

    • Default size
    • Hiding/showing the tab bar
    • Keyboard shortcuts
    • Profiles (cmd, Powershell, Ubuntu/wsl)
    • Color schemes

    I recommend looking through this to see exactly what you can change:

    The only settings I changed for each profile were to give each some padding. I changed the following:

    # from
    "padding": "0, 0, 0, 0",
    
    # to
    "padding": "20, 10, 20, 20",
    

    I also changed out the font from Consolas to my current favorite Operator Mono. I’ve also changed fontSize to be 22.

    Finally, I changed the color scheme.

    Color Schemes

    If we look towards the bottom of profiles.json, we can see that there are a few color schemes:

    • Campbell
    • One Half Dark
    • One Half Light
    • Solarized Dark
    • Solarized Light

    We can update the color scheme for each of the profiles by adjusting the setting. I’ve set all mine to be One Half Dark:

    "colorScheme": "One Half Dark",
    

    Here’s how my Ubuntu looks now:

    Drawbacks So Far

    While Windows Terminal is a definite upgrade over the default cmd and Powershell, there are a few things I miss from using Hyper and iTerm over on Mac.

    • No pasting with CTRL+V. Only right click and only in Ubuntu/wsl
    • No copying
    • No ability to click links
    • No split-screen (vertical/horizontal) like in Hyper or iTerm

    While these aren’t major drawbacks, I think I will be sticking with Hyper as my terminal for now.

    Conclusion

    Really looking forward to the changes that they bring in the next updates and kudos to Microsoft for taking a look at the developer tools on Windows and improving them.

    Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

    Learn more about us


    About the authors
    Default avatar
    Chris on Code

    author

    Still looking for an answer?

    Ask a questionSearch for more help

    Was this helpful?
     
    Leave a comment
    

    This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

    You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

    Try DigitalOcean for free

    Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

    Sign up

    Join the Tech Talk
    Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

    Please complete your information!

    Get our biweekly newsletter

    Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

    Hollie's Hub for Good

    Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

    Become a contributor

    Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

    Welcome to the developer cloud

    DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

    Learn more
    DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel