How to get a decent terminal for Windows

In this small post I show how to configure Powerlines for PowerShell Core and Windows Terminal.

Default shells on Windows are far from perfect. Very, very far, to put it mildly. I think, the reason for this is that Microsoft doesn’t really want their users to go into the internal details of their products. Therefore, they don’t give us the proper tools. Or perhaps this is a weird way of promoting Linux systems. But in recent years, the situation has been changing for the better. What makes me happy.

I’ve been using Cmder for a long time. It’s a very good tool, but it always felt unnatural and incomplete. So, I periodically try to find some alternative. This time I’m trying Windows Terminal. And it looks very promising:

1. It’s open source.
2. It’s configurable.
3. It supports multiple panes.
4. It has tabs.
5. It has command pallet.
6. It supports many shells.
7. It supports transparency and custom backgrounds.

But it’s not perfect yet. There are some small limitations that bother me:

1. You cannot change size of a pane.
2. You cannot pin tabs to bottom.
3. Urls are not clickable.
4. It does not have good autocompletion. It just uses capabilities of a shell.

Step by step instruction

As a bonus, you will get a nice looking terminal in VSCode.

More details you can find on the documentation page.