Pretty Windows Terminal and PowerShell Setup

Published on April 13, 2020 by Dominic Böttger · 2 min read

The new Windows Terminal is a big step forward for all people who like to work with the command line. It’s available in the Store or via Chocolatey. I suggest using the Store version to automatically stay up to date.

I did some modifications to the basic Terminal and PowerShell configuration which can eventually be helpful for some people.

PowerShell modules used by my configuration:

posh-git: Provides status information about a repository and offers tab completion in the terminal.
oh-my-posh: Beautifies the terminal
z: It’s a port of the z bash shell script and lets you quickly navigate through your filesystem based on your history.

Installation

Choco - Package manager for windows:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

PowerShell Core:

choco install powershell-core

Cascadia Code Font:

choco install cascadiacodepl

Configuration

First, configure your Terminal settings and set the font to “Cascadia Code PL”. Open the Windows Terminal, click on the “down-arrow” next to the tab bar and click on “Settings”.

After the Terminal settings have been modified it’s time to improve the PowerShell profile. Open it with:

code $profile

I added a function to automatically load or install modules depending on their installation state:

function Add-Module ($m) {
  if (Get-Module $m) {
    Write-Output "Module $m is already imported."
  }
  else {
    try {
      Import-Module $m -ErrorAction Stop
    }
    catch {
      if (Find-Module -Name $m | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq $m }) {
        Install-Module -Name $m -Force -Verbose -Scope CurrentUser -AllowClobber
        Import-Module $m -Verbose
      }
    }
  }
}

Add-Module "posh-git"
Add-Module "oh-my-posh"
Add-Module "z"
Set-Theme Paradox