If you like working with command-line tools you should work on *nix system. But if your work requires you to work on Windows like me you may find it helpful reading this post.

In this post, I would like to show some opinionated steps to make Terminal on Window look & feel better as well as increase your productivity.

  1. Install Windows Terminal
  2. Set up Windows Sub-system Linux
  3. Install OhMyZSH
  4. Customize Windows Terminal

Install Terminal

Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users. It includes many of the features most frequently requested by the Windows command-line community including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming & styling, and more.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal#windows-terminal

You can install Windows Terminal in two ways:

Set up Linux inside Windows

Fortunately, you can use Linux comand-lines by using the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

You can follow this intrustion to set up Windows Subsystem for Linux.

There are some limitations of WSL such as:

  • You cannot run ALL Linux app on WSL because it isn’t a real Linux kernel (it is just a Linux interface mapping for Windows)
  • File IO perfomance isn’t good

However, with the WSL 2 you can work on real Linux inside Windows completely with better file IO performance. You can access the WSL 2 now through the Windows insider program (fast).

Note: I’m using WSL 1 while writing this post.

Install OhMyZSH

The OhMyZSH works fine in WSL and you can install it by the script below (run in a WSL command line)

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Note: If you got an error about missing curl command line you need to install it based on your distro.

Customize Windows Terminal

Install a monospaced font

Because of some themes of ohmyzsh use monospaced font so you need to install it before enabling the theme. I have used Fira Code font for a long time and I really like it. You can follow this link to install Fira Code on Windows.

Create a custom Windows Terminal profile

You create/edit profile of Windows Terminal by editing a profiles.json file. You can open the profiles.json as the image below.

The profiles.json file has a structure like this:

  • globals section contains Windows Terminal’s general settings like defaultProfile keybindings
  • profiles: contains a list of profile settings
  • schemes: contains a list of color schemes which will be used in profile

To create a custom profile you can do by these steps:

  1. Create a color scheme named Argonaut by copy the json object below into the schemes sections in the profiles.json
{
  "background" : "#0E1019",
  "black" : "#232323",
  "blue" : "#008DF8",
  "brightBlack" : "#BABABA",
  "brightBlue" : "#0092FF",
  "brightCyan" : "#67FFF0",
  "brightGreen" : "#ABE15B",
  "brightPurple" : "#9A5FEB",
  "brightRed" : "#FF2740",
  "brightWhite" : "#FFFFFF",
  "brightYellow" : "#FFD242",
  "cyan" : "#00D8EB",
  "foreground" : "#FFFAF4",
  "green" : "#8CE10B",
  "name" : "Argonaut",
  "purple" : "#6D43A6",
  "red" : "#FF000F",
  "white" : "#FFFFFF",
  "yellow" : "#FFB900"
}

You can find another color scheme at this link

  1. Create a new profile for WSL by adding the json below into profiles section
        {
            "acrylicOpacity" : 0.75,
            "closeOnExit" : true,
            "colorScheme" : "Argonaut",
            "commandline" : "C:\\Windows\\System32\\wsl.exe",
            "cursorColor" : "#FFFFFF",
            "cursorShape" : "bar",
            "fontFace" : "Fira Code Retina",
            "fontSize" : 14,
            "guid" : "{a3240086-20d1-46a2-a0da-0c71e7c86908}",
            "historySize" : 9001,
            "icon" : "ms-appx:///ProfileIcons/{0caa0dad-35be-5f56-a8ff-afceeeaa6101}.png",
            "name" : "WSL",
            "padding" : "10, 10, 10, 10",
            "snapOnInput" : true,
            "startingDirectory" : "C:/",
            "useAcrylic" : true
        }

Now you need to save the profiles.json file then close and open the Windows Terminal again to apply new settings.

You can try the new profile now.

ZSH settings

We will edit the ~/.zshrc file to update some zsh settings. You can use vim in WSL Terminal to edit

vim ~/.zshrc

or you can use the VSCode to edit ~/.zshrc. To use edit code for editing file in WSL you need to:

  1. Install VSCode
  2. Install Remote – WSL extension
  3. In the WSL terminal, type this command: code ~/.zshrc

When the ~/.zshrc file is opened in editor you need to:

  1. find and update the variable ZSH_THEME="agnoster". (You can choose another theme in the list https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/Themes
  2. find and update plugins variable to plugins=(git zsh-syntax-highlighting)or you can enable adding more plugins https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/tree/master/plugins

You can save and close edit at this point. However, I would like to introduce some alias that I use daily for development.

alias gco='git checkout'
alias gfo='git fetch origin --prune'
alias gcom='git commit -m'
alias gpo='git push origin --set-upstream $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)'
alias gstash='git stash'
alias gstashpop='git stash pop'

function gup () {
  c=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
  git checkout "$1"
  git pull
  git checkout "$c"
}

function gsave() {
  git add .
  msg=$1
  if [[ -z $msg ]]; then
    msg="save code"
  fi
  git commit -m "$msg"
  gpo
}
# reset git repo with its submodules
function git_reset_repo() {
  git clean -xfd
  git submodule foreach --recursive git clean -xfd
  git reset --hard
  git submodule foreach --recursive git reset --hard
  git submodule update --init --recursive
}       

# Make directory and enter it
function mkd () {
  mkdir -p "$@" && cd "$_";
}

Conclusion

Please let me know if you have any hiccups when following the steps above.

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