Terminal Upgrade
Last month I went down the rabbit hole setting up my terminal on my Windows laptop. I had been using Git bash for all of my git & Github work, but did not have much other experience with the command line and wanted to improve my skills and upgrade my tools. As a starting point I followed the free video series from Wes Bos called "Command Line Power User." The goal of the video series is to get you up and running using Zsh and oh-my-zsh. I also used the GitHub repo "CmderZSH" by Dylan Fontana to help with some of the nitty gritty of installing on Windows. I decided to go with the Powerline9k theme to add some customzation.
My Current Setup
I won't get into the process of setting it all up as the links above can help you with that. With that being said, here is my current setup:
- Cygwin ("...provide functionality similar to Linux on Windows")
- Mintty (default terminal emulator for Cygwin)
- Cmder (console emulator)
- Zsh (Z shell)
- oh-my-zsh (framework for managing Zsh configuration)
- Powerline9k theme
Opening Files and File Explorer
After spending (more than anticipated!) time setting it all up, there was still something that I was struggling to get working. In Wes' videos, he has examples of opening files in his code editor using the 'open' command. I could not get it to work for me and after trying a few different things unsuccessfully, I left it and came back to it later.
The Solution
After some searching, I came across the answer that I was looking for. In Windows, we have a similar command to 'open' and that is the 'explorer' command. Here are a few examples of the command in action.
Open a File Explorer
Open a File Explorer in Current Directory
Open a File with the Default Program
Open a File with VSCode
*different command but similar functionality
That concludes my first blog post since I started learning to code! I have benefited greatly from so many posts and articles and I am hoping that I will be able to give back by sharing what I am learning as I dig into JavaScript and work towards landing a full time remote dev job. Best of luck to everyone on their goals for 2019 and I hope to post again soon.
Top comments (2)
Good work, command line is a powerful and effective way to work. Soon you will be sick of pointing and clicking :)
A few suggestions:
Thanks for your reply. I’m enjoying Zsh at the moment so I’m going to stick with it for now, but I will keep those other options in mind. WSL isn’t an option on my laptop, but once I upgrade, that’s definitely the way I’m going to go.