Make Your Windows Terminal Awesome

One of the best tools for developers is a terminal. It’s very powerful and handy if you know how to use it. It may come to your mind, that terminal means bearing a black screen with white text. It’s not always true. Let’s make the terminal colorful and awesome. Windows has released its powerful command prompt, Windows Terminal. You can customize it to make it more awesome. I have tweaked some configurations and wanted to share them with you.

You can install Windows Terminal from Microsoft Store. It’s Free. Please make sure Windows Powershell is the default profile for the Windows terminal. You can check it from the settings of Windows Terminal. We are going to use oh-my-posh to add the theme in the command line. Execute the below commands in the terminal PowerShell

Install-Module posh-git -Scope CurrentUser
Install-Module oh-my-posh -Scope CurrentUser
Install-Module -Name PSReadLine -Scope CurrentUser -Force -SkipPublisherCheck
notepad $PROFILE

Add the below lines in the notepad

Import-Module posh-git
Import-Module oh-my-posh
Set-PoshPrompt Paradox

# Shows the navigable menu of all options when hitting Tab
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete

# Autocompletion for arrow keys
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key UpArrow -Function HistorySearchBackward
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key DownArrow -Function HistorySearchForward

#Prediction
Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionSource History
Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionViewStyle ListView

Execute again in PowerShell

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

Download the Cascadia Code font set zip from https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/releases

Install CascadiaMonoPL.ttf font from the zip file

Open Windows Terminal settings. Click on Windows Powershell Profile. Click on Appearance. Select Font Cascadia Mono PL and save.

Restart the terminal. You can see the awesome terminal.

More features like a press tab to show available folders will be enabled. Now you can press the arrow key to select the folder

Predictive IntelliSense is a very interesting and useful feature. It will predict the command from history while you type the command.

oh-my-posh has multiple themes available. You can find the theme list at https://ohmyposh.dev/docs/themes

I have chosen paradox theme. You can choose any theme and change it in $PROFILE config > Set-PoshPrompt <theme_name>.

Let’s try another theme.

open $PROFILE in notepad and replace PoshPromt to Set-PoshPrompt iterm2 . If the fonts are not properly shown, you need to download Caskaydia Cove Nerd Font Complete and install Caskaydia Cove Nerd Font Complete Windows Compatible.ttf. Select FontFace CaskaydiaCove NF from Windows Terminal PowerShell profile settings. The result should look like the below.

Experiment with the theme and enjoy the command prompt 🙂