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.
- Install Windows Terminal
- Set up Windows Sub-system Linux
- Install OhMyZSH
- 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:
- Windows Store App
- Chocolately Install Chocolately
choco install microsoft-windows-terminal
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.
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The profiles.json
file has a structure like this:
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globals
section contains Windows Terminal’s general settings likedefaultProfile
keybindings
profiles
: contains a list of profile settingsschemes
: contains a list of color schemes which will be used in profile
To create a custom profile you can do by these steps:
- Create a color scheme named Argonaut by copy the json object below into the
schemes
sections in theprofiles.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
- 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.
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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:
- Install VSCode
- Install Remote – WSL extension
- In the WSL terminal, type this command:
code ~/.zshrc
When the ~/.zshrc
file is opened in editor you need to:
- 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 - find and update
plugins
variable toplugins=(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.