How to Use the New Windows Terminal for Your Productivity

What is Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is Microsoft’s attempt to bring the functionality of Linux, macOS, and third party terminal emulators to Windows 10.

Windows has always had built-in text terminals such as Command Prompt and Powershell. You also have a choice of shells for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). But it lacked a powerful all in one solution for developers and power users.

What Makes Windows Terminal Better?

The first clear upgrade on opening the Windows Terminal is the ability to use tabs. Without tabs, it doesn’t take long for your taskbar to fill up, and hovering over an icon searching for the right window is hardly any better.

But, there is something even more compelling about the new tab system:

You can have many tabs of different types open simultaneously. According to the Windows Terminal development blog,

Any application which has a command-line interface can be run inside the Windows Terminal.

This is a massive upgrade and makes almost all forms of development much easier to handle. Apart from this, Microsoft has incorporated elements from popular window managers.

Native Terminal Window Splitting

Split screens have been the focus of many window managers for Linux and are standard with many operating systems. You have more than one option to split Windows Terminal into multiple shells of different types too.

This image also highlights one of the more practical visual upgrades the Windows Terminal received.

Unique colors and font schemes help to recognize terminal types at a glance. You will like it if you already have a preferred terminal style and layout.

Any Color You Like

Microsoft has made customization a central pillar of the Windows Terminal development process. You can modify everything about it via a JSON settings file, much like Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s open-source code editor. Most Terminal elements can change in real-time, with different levels of opacity and blur on the background, alongside a variety of fonts, colors, and styles in front.

You can even use images or animated gifs as your background, as YouTuber ThioJoe shows in his comprehensive video about Windows Terminal:

Those who love ligatures in their code will also be pleased to hear that the Cascadia Mono font featured in the preview versions of the Terminal now has an alternate version called Cascadia Code. The only modifications to the original font are the addition of ligatures.

The entire visual side of the Terminal is rendered on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), keeping everything snappy and running smoothly.

Endless Customization

If you find yourself using several different layouts for Windows Terminal, you can use command-line arguments to launch custom windows.

The same commands used above could also work as shortcuts pinned to your taskbar, giving you an unlimited number of custom Terminal option close to hand. These features, among many others, will improve in future builds of Terminal.

The customization doesn’t stop there. There same JSON settings file for the Terminal type and appearance also allows the addition of custom shortcut keys. These can create new split panes or tabs of specific types on the fly.