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9 Windows Terminal Tips by Scott Hanselman

Hello, Habr! You may have heard that the new Windows Terminal is coming soon. We already wrote about this here . Our colleague Scott Hanselman prepared some tips on how to work with the new terminal. Join now!

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So, you downloaded Windows Terminal and ... now what?


At first you may not be thrilled. This is still the Terminal, and it will not lead you, holding the hand.

1) Read the user documentation for Windows Terminal

2) Settings are expressed in JSON format . You will do better if your JSON file editor is something like Visual Studio Code and supports JSON as well as intellisense.

  • Check your default settings! For clarity, I present my profile.json (which is in no way ideal). I installed requestedTheme, alwaysShowTabs and defaultProfile.

3) Decide on the keyboard shortcuts. Windows Terminal has ample customization options .

  • Any key you press can be reassigned.

4) Does the design fit your desires?


5) Want to go to the next level? Explore background images.

  • You can set background images or even GIFs. More details here .

6) Specify your startingDirectory.
  • If you use WSL, you may sooner or later want your home directory to be located on the Linux file system .

7) You can still use Far, GitBash, Cygwin, or cmder if you want. Details in the documentation .

8) Examine the Windows Terminal command line arguments.

  • You may know that you can start Windows Terminal using “wt.exe”, but now you can use command line arguments! Here are some examples:

    wt ; split-pane -p "Windows PowerShell" ; split-pane -H wsl.exe
wt -d .
wt -d c:\github

    At this point, you can go as far as you wish. Make other icons, pin them to the taskbar, get off to the fullest. Also, check out subcommands like new-tab, split-pane, and focus-tab.

9) I recorded a video demonstrating to a person who is used to Mac and Linux how to configure Windows Terminal in conjunction with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), maybe it will be interesting for you.

Please share below your tips, profiles and favorite topics for the terminal!

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