Windows Terminal, For a Handsome Command Line Experience

A co-worker was giving a demo a few weeks back, and my key takeaway wasn’t what it should’ve been. I left with, “Why did their command prompt look so much better than mine!?”

Now, I’ve admittedly done zero customization with my command prompt. I’ve been using the plain blue default PowerShell prompt for as long as I can remember. I learned they were using the new Windows Terminal. I invested a little time in setting it up & customizing, and I feel super cool now.

Scott Hanselman has a great article on how to get it & make it look good, and that’s a great place to start.

My journey deviates from his a little, though, for unrelated reasons. First, my Windows Store doesn’t load. Not a problem, though, since you can also install it using Chocolatey.

$ choco install microsoft-windows-terminal 

You can follow Hanselman’s steps for installing posh-git:

$ Install-Module posh-git -Scope CurrentUser
$ Install-Module oh-my-posh -Scope CurrentUser

And for updating your profile (run notepad $PROFILE) to include the following. Note that I prefer the Sorin theme for Oh My Posh:

Import-Module posh-git
Import-Module oh-my-posh
Set-Theme Sorin

I also installed his suggested font, Cascadia Code PL, which can be obtained here.

My last step was to make a few more customizations via Windows Terminal’s profile settings (ctrl+, from Windows Terminal). I adjusted the color scheme, font size, and starting directory by adding the following:

"profiles":
{
    "defaults":
    {
        // Put settings here that you want to apply to all profiles
        "colorScheme": "One Half Dark",
        "fontFace":  "Cascadia Code PL",
        "fontSize": 10,
        "startingDirectory": "c:/source"
    },

Author: Adam Prescott

I'm enthusiastic and passionate about creating intuitive, great-looking software. I strive to find the simplest solutions to complex problems, and I embrace agile principles and test-driven development. View all posts by Adam Prescott