My experience with Windows Terminal

Published in

rehearse

3 min readJan 4, 2022

In fall of this year, my MacBook just stopped working out of nowhere. As if that wasn’t enough, Apple Care folks told me that it’d take almost a month to replace all the parts because of dearth of Silicon Chips and everything.

Given that my day-to-day work is heavily development oriented, I needed an alternative Linux or a Mac machine, but all I had that time was this Windows Device I use for gaming and stuff. And that’s how I got introduced to Windows Terminal, and its outstanding integration with WSL 2.

Honestly, I was just excited to try out Windows 11 which actually had countless improvements since Windows 10 unlike macOS (they literally just change icons every year and call it the best macOS ever). Anyway, I was expecting something like PowerShell over Command Prompt 🙄. But contrary to what I had imagined, Windows Terminal is actually pretty good and polished.

Things I like…

Multiple tabs: You can open multiple tabs under a single window having different shell types, all at once. You might argue it’s not that much of a fancy feature, but it being easily accessible and configurable from JSON based settings is actually quite nice. You can use Ctrl + Shift + T to open a new tab.
Multiple panes: If you have used Tmux in Linux or Mac, you might already be familiar with how handy it can be to have multiple panes visible at the same time. Fortunately, Windows Terminal is already equipped with multiple panes feature. You can start a new pane by holding Alt + Shiftand + to open it on the right and - to open it underneath the current one.
Polished Design: Windows Terminal overall has a quite pleasant look and feel to it. Better design, updated fonts, fixed zoom options, easily configurable settings and a VS Code like command palette makes it the best Terminal I have ever worked with.