What do you think if I tell you that your PowerShell can look like this? It's pretty right? 😍 🤩

After reading this post, you'll get this beautiful console that you'll love to work with. And not only on PowerShell, but on WSL and Azure Cloud Shell too!! 🥳 🤟

Terminal alternatives

There are more options than the Windows Command Line (CMD) or Windows PowerShell. While they are mostly emulators that run on the terminal, they add good features and look better than the default consoles.

Alternatives over there:

• CMDer
• ConEmu
• Windows Terminal
• Hyper
• Alacritty
• Terminator (running over WSL)
• Fluent Terminal I just found it and looks great

I like to keep my dev environment simple so my choice is the new Windows Terminal using PowerShell Core.

Why Windows Terminal? Microsoft listened to the community and created a totally brand new terminal which is really easy to use, have a lot of cool features like tabs, panes and it can run PowerShell, CMD, Git bash, Linux bash, Azure Cloud Shell as well as any other.

The Windows terminal is relatively new. Previously I worked for many years with ConEmu and I can say that it is a very good option too

I encourage you to test all these alternatives and find which one fit best with you.

This article is based on Windows Terminal, but the configuration can be applied to the other tools as well.

Installation

Let's see what we need to install to convert our boring terminal to an awesome one.

• Posh-Git (git extension)
• Oh-My-Posh (themes)
• Get-ChildItemColor (colorized sub-commands)
• Power Fonts (techie fonts)

Many of these should be installed using PowerShell with admin rights.

Well, let's start 💪 💻

Changing the ExecutionPolicy

NOTE: this steps should be executed on PowerShell and PowerShell Core if you want to have the same theme on both.

So, we open the PowerShell as Admin and change the ExecutionPolicy to RemoteSigned

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser -Confirm

When you are done, you can go back to the previous configuration by updating the ExecutionPolicy with scope Process.

Installing what we need

PowerShellGet\Install-Module posh-git -Scope CurrentUser -Force
Install-Module oh-my-posh -Scope CurrentUser
Install-Module -AllowClobber Get-ChildItemColor

If you are using PowerShell Core you have to install PSReadLine.

Install-Module -Name PSReadLine -Scope CurrentUser -Force -SkipPublisherCheck

To allow Power Fonts on our system we should clone the Github repository and run.

.\install.ps1

Tip: the repo has a lot of fonts, so in my case I deleted all of them except the one called Meslo Dotted.

Allowing all this stuff

In order to have all the modules installed every time we open the terminal, first we need to update our profile file.

code $profile

And add these lines to it

# Modules import
Import-Module posh-git
Import-Module oh-my-posh
Import-Module Get-ChildItemColor
​
# Theme to use
Set-Theme Agnoster

Now, we need to tell Windows Terminal to use our selected font. To do so, open the Settings file

We search for the "profile" property and update it with the following.

…..   
"profiles": {
   "defaults": {
     "fontFace": "Meslo LG M DZ for Powerline",
     "fontSize": 8,
     "colorScheme" : "One Half Dark"
  },
   "list": [
    {
       // Make changes here to the powershell.exe profile
       "guid": "{61c54bbd-c2c6-5271-96e7-009a87ff44bf}",
       "name": "Windows PowerShell",
       "commandline": "powershell.exe",
       "hidden": false
    }
    .....   

If you are using ConEmu o CMDER go to the Settings Fonts and select the Font previously installed.

NOTE: This changes will be reflected on the Visual Studio Code Terminal too 😉

Extending this to WSL

The magic of WSL is that we can use many flavours of Linux directly on Windows, removing any need of double-boot or VMs. Even so, its bash is still boring! so let's see how we can have the same here.

The natural option is to install PowerShell Core on the distro and set it as default bash, in order to follow the same steps as previously.

But, we are on Linux, where there are many alternatives and a good one is ZSH.

Installation

First we'll update our Linux version

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now we can install everything we need

sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get install zsh

We make ZSH our default

chsh -s /bin/zsh

Update the .bashrc file by adding this at the beginning of it.

if test -t 1; then
exec zsh
Fi

Install Oh-My-Zsh

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

We select the theme from the ./zshrc file.

code $HOME/.zshrc

Search for “ZSH_THEME” property and change it for one you like

ZSH_THEME="norm"

The last step is to install the plugin zsh-dircolors-solarized by cloning the repo

git clone --recursive git://github.com/joel-porquet/zsh-dircolors-solarized $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-dircolors-solarized

Then go back to the .zshrc file and grant permissions to the pluging

plugins=(zsh-dircolors-solarized)

Finally select the theme for the plugin

setupsolarized dircolors.ansi-dark

The result…

Extending this to Azure Cloud Shell

I didn't try to set up all these things on Azure Cloud Shell, but it's based on Linux - so you can install ZSH and set it up as we did! Here it's explained (https://www.danielstechblog.io/setting-up-zsh-with-oh-my-zsh-in-azure-cloud-shell/)[https://www.danielstechblog.io/setting-up-zsh-with-oh-my-zsh-in-azure-cloud-shell/]

🧉 + 🥐🥐 = Happy coder 💻