The Ultimate Terminal For Windows, Couples Things To Begin With
Watching star wars from windows terminal |
Today i just discovered a very cool terminal for Windows OS, it was developed by Microsoft itself, so it’s not gonna be disappointing, and probably a long term project. This very cool and modern terminal, the best terminal console I've ever seen.
If you don’t know about this project, Windows terminal is Microsoft project, a better version of terminal that runs on Windows. Here’s the Official website of the terminal (https://aka.ms/terminal) from Microsoft. You can look for much detailed information, and how to install it.
What to do the with the terminal
The first thing i would do is to make the Windows terminal launch in fullscreen mode (maximize mode), which you probably already know, even this simple thing is not possible to do in classic cmd or even powershell. To make windows terminal launch maximize,just put "launchMode": "maximized", into your settings.json. If you don't know where settings.json is, open Windows terminal and click on Settings. After you save the new setting, you can now open the terminal in maximized mode. There’s no such thing as fullscreen, you can press F11, but it will also hide the tabs, to make fullscreen with the tabs you can hide the windows taskbar from your windows settings, that will do the trick.
The second thing is probably changing the background, if you are a robot, looks don't matter, because robots don’t have heart (probably, kind of true though), they only have transistors and stuff. But as humans, we are this creature that is badly designed, and we can get bored by looking at something that’s just one color, we like seeing colorful stuff. In windows terminal, you can change the terminal color whatever color you want, the basic RGB, #000000 to #ffffff. Not only those huge range numbers of colors, you can also set an image background for your terminal. Which one do you want?
1. Just change to basic color, put "background": "#333333", inside profiles -> default on your settings.json. #333333 can be changed to your favorite color.
2. Or changing to a background image, firstable you need to have an image and you know the location of the image, for example "C:/Pictures/My-image.jpg", now put "backgroundImage": "C:/Pictures/My-image.jpg", also insides profiles -> default.
The third thing is to install WSL. Windows is a closed sourced and heavily GUI oriented operating system, so that’s probably the reason you don’t have richness in their terminal system environment. Where in linux, we can get a lot of programs for free that can be installed and run from just the terminal, no need to switch between windows kind of thing.
If you don’t already have WSL, you need to install it first, there’s no better explanation than to read it from the official vendor itself. Here’s from Microsoft blog on how to install windows subsystem for linux or WSL, the reference is here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10.
After having WSL installed and you have your chosen Linux distro appear on the terminal list something like this, mine is Debian 10 poin 1 or something.
We can then try to set the WSL/debian terminal as our default environment, so anytime we open windows terminal. It always opens debian/Linux, not the one that is windows cmd or powershell. We can use lots of Linux features and apps by using WSL. Btw to to do this:
1. Open windows terminal settings, scroll down to profiles -> list, then copy the guid, the one that belongs to WSL.
2. Then scroll up, and replace the defaultProfile with that WSL GUID. Save and restart the terminal to see the changes.
Watching star wars on the terminal
After you successfully login to your linux system using WSL, now you can start doing many cool stuff like watching star wars.
1. First, like any regular debian based linux distros, do some obligatory update:
sudo apt update
2. After that install telnet
sudo apt install telnet
3. Then watch the star wars from telnet
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
The reason i want to try to do anything on terminal
Yesterday I just wrote about vim and I made a decision when I was on the computer. I will try to use it in an extreme way, the old school way, when there were only terminals. Maybe I can do anything only with the terminal. I am not Linus Torvalds so it probably gonna take a while for me to get used to it.
I get more philosophical day by day, in the past, i the past i just don’t care whatever tools to use in my computer as long as it can get things done, but nowadays after years of years using computer i feel something different, i want to do the hard way, i want to make my brains active by not always relying on modern tools.
So that’s the reason why i started to shift using terminal, without any tools, our mind kind of activated and it's probably the best for us, it makes our brains sharper, kind of.