Setting Up Your Terminal
We’ll be working at the ommand line a lot. Let’s make sure your tools are going to serve you well.
Windows Command Shells
If you’re using Windows, you may want to install a better command line terminal. One that works quite well and has lots of good features, including support for multiple tabs of terminals, and terminals of different types (cmd, PowerShell, git bash, Windows Subsystem for Linux), shortcut keys, and more, is Cmder. It comes as a zip file that you can unzip to your home directory or desktop and run from there.
Once you install it, you may want to go through the settings and configure things. A few settings I modified:
- Bumped up the font size and selected my favorite console font (Fira Code) from General > Fonts settings area
- Selected Show status bar in the Features > Status bar settings area
- Went through the color schemes in Features > Colors and chose my favorite (< Tomorrow Night Bright >)
- Turned on Start selection with Shift+Arrow in the Keys & Macro > Mark/Copy area
In addition, in a PowerShell tab, run the following:
Install-Module -Name PSReadLine -RequiredVersion 1.2 -Scope CurrentUser -Force -SkipPublisherCheck
Terminal Options for macOS
The Mac terminal is pretty good. However, if you’re looking for something better, I’ve found iTerm2 for macOS to offer a number of useful features as well.
Terminal Options for Linux
On most Linux distributions with a graphical user interface, the baseline terminal will be fine. However, if you want to be able to setup single-window multi-terminal layouts and re-order terminal tabs, etc., take a look at Gnome Terminator.