What Can You Do With Windows Terminal on Windows 11?
Windows Terminal has been out for awhile, but has truly been one of the biggest every day experiences I have loved about the new era of windows software (Windows 11, Windows Terminal, Power Automate, WSL2, New Windows Store, etc…). Terminals are very personal tool for programmers and software workers. As such, it is a software that feels better when it looks and operates the way you expect and desire. Its also a software that feels more frustrating when it doesn’t because you experience the inefficiencies and pain points on a regular basis.
Windows Terminal has brought a powerful customization feature set to the windows command line experience and gone above and beyond including hardware accelerated rendering, a pane system and multiple shell support allowing for Powershell, Cmd or WSL (windows subsystem for Linux) which opens up many Linux distributions as shell options too.
Here I want to summarize alot of the current features I have found useful and interesting with this awesome Terminal, and highly encourage all windows developers to check out the Windows Terminal!
Look & Feel
Windows 11 brings a rounded borders style and clean default backgrounds that make it easy to spin up a beautiful terminal setup almost out of the box. Windows Terminal includes many customization features for appearance as well allowing you to configure background image and opacity, padding with borders, font size per pane, and even acrylic background options.
Profiles & Shells
One of the biggest features of Windows Terminal is the ability to configure use multiple profiles which allow for different shells.
These profiles can be configured in the settings page or directly via a json settings file (accessible from the settings page in the bottom left corner). Having the ability to configure the terminal from a json file makes it really easy to share configurations or keep version of settings for yourself.
New Linux shells can be acquired in a number of ways. The windows store being the easiest. Linux shells are run through WSL and WSL2 brings the ability to run practically any docker image directly so technically the sky is the limit on what your profile shell could be here.
Command Pallet
There is also a command pallet similar to VS Code that can make it easy to locate and set features quickly without having to remember ALL the hotkeys. The Command Pallet can be launched with ctrl+shift+p
Splitting Panes
Another BIG feature for me, is the ability to use panes. Panes can be created via right clicking on a tab and selecting “Split Tab”, via the hotkeys or via the command pallet.
When you split from the command pallet you get the additional option of choosing a new profile to start from so you can have multiple shells within the same window.
Customizable Hotkeys
If you want to change or add new hotkeys for actions throughout the terminal you can easily browse, change and add them from the Settings->Actions page or add the hotkeys directly to your settings json file.
Tab Colors
Selecting Color... and More will give you a wide variety of options to set specific colors for any tab. If you tend to use many tabs instead of the panes this can be quite useful and in general having personalization options is really nice to get things feeling exactly how you like them.
Searching Text
Using ctrl+shift+f will allow you to search through output in the currently active pane. This includes any output in the history which makes it really easy to find previous commands by searching for parts of script or command.
Set Windows Terminal as Default
You can also set windows terminal as the default terminal instead of cmd.exe if you want to as well from the Settings->Startup page.
Other Cool Features & Settings
Settings->Interaction—Auto detect URLS makes it easy to ctrl+click on a link and open a page in the browser.
Settings->Appearance— Always on top keeps your terminal in front of all other windows. Useful if your screens are cluttered as mine.
Settings->{profile}->Appearance— Creates the glassy background effect
Settings->Startup— Decide how you want new instances of Windows Terminal to operate. “Attach to most recently used window” makes it easy to keep your workflow streamlined and avoid many different terminals floating around.
Settings->{profile}->General—Each profile’s tab icon can be changed to a image or emoji of choice.
Settings->{profile}->Appearance— This is a fun feature but not very useful for the day to day. Might provide a bit of nostalgia for some though!
Settings->{profile}->Appearance— Set a custom image as the terminal background or use the desktop image.
