terminal/doc/user-docs/index.md

Windows Terminal User Documentation

NOTE: At the time of writing Windows Terminal is still under active development and many things will change. If you notice an error in the docs, please raise an issue. Or better yet, please file a PR with an appropriate update!

Installing Windows Terminal

From Source Code

Follow the instructions in this repo's README.

From the Microsoft Store

1. Make sure you have upgraded to the current Windows 10 release (at least 1903)
2. Search for Windows Terminal in the Store
3. Review the minimum system settings to ensure you can successfully install Windows Terminal
4. Install in the normal fashion

Starting Windows Terminal

From the Windows Start menu, select Windows Terminal and run the application.

Note: You can right click on the application item and run with Windows Administrator privilege if required.

The default shell is PowerShell.

Command line options

None at this time. See issue #607

Multiple Tabs

Additional shells can be started by hitting the + button from the tab bar -- a new instance of the default shell is displayed (default shortcut Ctrl+Shift+1).

Running a Different Shell

Note: The following text assumes you have WSL installed.

To choose a different shell (e.g. cmd.exe or WSL bash) then

1. Select the down button next to the + in the tab bar
2. Choose your new shell from the list (more on how to extend the list in the config section)

Starting a new PowerShell tab with admin privilege

There is no current plan to support this feature for security reaons. See issue #623

Using cut and paste in the Terminal window

With PowerShell

• Copy - Select the text with mouse (default left button), then right click with mouse
• Paste - by default use <ctrl>+v>, or right click with mouse

With Bash

• Copy - Select the text with mouse (default left button), then right click with mouse
• Paste - Right click with mouse

Add a "Open Windows Terminal Here" to File Explorer

Not currently supported "out of the box". See issue #1060

Configuring Windows Terminal

At the time of writing all Windows Terminal settings are managed via a json file.

From the down button in the top bar select Settings (default shortcut Ctrl+,).

Your default json editor will open up the Terminal settings file. The file can be found at $env:LocalAppData\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_<randomString>/RoamingState

An introduction to the the various settings can be found here.

The list of valid settings can be found in the Profiles.json Documentation doc.

Tips and Tricks:

1. In PowerShell you can discover if the Windows Terminal is being used by checking for the existence of the environment variable WT_SESSION.

   Under pwsh you can also use (Get-Process -Id $pid).Parent.Parent.ProcessName -eq 'WindowsTerminal'

   (ref https://twitter.com/r_keith_hill/status/1142871145852440576)

2. Please add more Tips and Tricks