Scott Hanselman

In this time of the Corona Virus and COVID-19, Microsoft has taken the unprecedented move of shutting down their Seattle campus. No one goes in to work until March 25th. That means they're all remote workers! Like me! For 13 years!

Do note that I am deeply sympathetic for the situation we all find ourselves in and I'm deeply aware of the privilege we have as tech/desk workers to be able to do our jobs remotely. I am also (dare I say) looking forward to what I believe will be a dramatic increase in Remote Worker Empathy on the part of the in office folks.

Check out my previous posts on being remote and explore the Remote Work category if you like.

• Good, Better, Best creating the ultimate remote worker webcam setup on a budget
• Tragedies of the Remote Worker: "Looks like you're the only one on the call"
• 30 Tips for Successful Communication as a Remote Worker
• Virtual Camaraderie - A Persistent Video "Portal" for the Remote Worker

I also want to showcase some of the great tips and suggestion for remote work that are being shared. Here's tips from our own Adrian Murphy who has shared them internally at the company and has given me permission to share them externally. You can follow Adrian on Twitter and thank him his team for sharing all this information and for their kindness!

These tips are written in the context of using Microsoft Teams (which has an extraordinary free plan, BTW) but you can replace those references with Zoom/Skype/Whatever and the tips are the same.

Tips, Tricks and Best Practices for Working Remotely

Working remote can be quite a shift from being in the office, and sometimes the things you take for granted in person suddenly become massive inconveniences when working remotely. Whether this is your first time being remote or you're a remote superstar from the Antarctica office, this collection of tips and best practices may help you get settled.

Communication

• Be mindful of time zones. Your middle of the day may be someone’s 3:00 am, so when scheduling calls or pinging via Teams, don’t forget to take into account the time zone differences for all involved.
• Turn on your video when on a call with your team (there’s a bunch of communication which is non-verbal). Occasionally show off your pets on said video. It’s the little things that make it all feel more human.
  • Some might have reduced bandwidth. Consider turning on video at the beginning during intro and turning it off during important parts if you experience hiccups.
• During calls, make sure to wait a few extra seconds when asking if folks online have any comments. It can take time for folks to un-mute themselves, and sometimes things can chug or hiccup. It’s not as instant as it is face to face, so you don’t want to move on before folks can even get a word out on a call.
  • Some headsets have a hardware mute button and different conference software has hotkeys for mute/unmute. That can make it faster to unmute yourself.
• If you are in a room full of people with a conference mic, speak loudly and clearly regardless of where you are sitting. While folks in the room may be able to hear you fine from 6-10 feet away, the conference room mic registers barely a whisper for those dialing in.
• Mute your mic in big meetings, in small meetings it’s up to you—an unmuted mic will also give some of the incidental non-verbal (but vocal) indicators of what you’re thinking/feeling.
• If you plan to present, prepare for meetings ahead of time by pre-loading web pages, powerpoints, or other presentation materials. During larger calls Teams can sometimes get bogged down, esp with many video sources at once, and this will cause the rest of your software to run slower. Having a room of 15+ people watch a web page load for 30 seconds is a great way to lose friends.
• Summarize action items or conclusions in the call for everyone when one has been reached. Finalizing a conversation by summarizing the key take away is a great way to make sure the information is correct, and allows the folks on the call have a chance to hear it and respond if need be before the meeting moves on.
• If you are leading/proctoring a meeting, be prepared to play switchboard operator if multiple people speak up at once. In person we use social cues and body language to naturally reach a speaking order, in a remote call someone is going to have to make sure only one person is speaking at a time, but also that everyone gets heard eventually. It can be as simple as “why don’t we have person A speak first, then person B” and let the conversation flow from there.
  • If someone has something to say but is waiting their turn, and the conversation veers in a different direction for a few mins, make sure to check back with the person who was waiting. It’s possible their comment was addressed during the course of that conversation, but don’t assume so. Offer them the chance to speak before the meeting moves on.
• If you are presenting from your machine remotely, ZOOM IN. What looks fine to you on a home monitor may be microscopic on a projected screen in a room of 20 people. You can use the free ZoomIt tool from SysInternals and draw on the screen if you like.
• If possible/acceptable, record meetings in Teams. This allows folks who weren’t able to attend, or may have otherwise missed a moment in the meeting due to a bandwidth hiccup, to catch up after the fact. Add the video link to your meeting notes when sending out (Teams will usually finish processing a recorded video within 10-15 mins of capturing it, and sends a notification to you in outlook that it’s ready).
• Keep on top of your mails and Teams inboxes. If people can’t walk up to tap you on the shoulder, this is your only interface with your colleagues. Consider enabling pop up notifications or flashing task bar indicators for when you have unread messages.
  • Likewise, be aware that Teams chat is async by nature, just like e-mail. Expect more delay than when you walk to someone’s desk to ask them a question.
• Never forget that there’s a real person behind every email address, Teams message, and DevOps Tickets.
• You may have to “read the room” more as a remote worker. You may not be able to see someone’s body language to know whether or not they are joking, smiling, or upset about something.
• It’s okay to take calls in casual clothes if you're comfortable and able. Don’t wear anything that’s offensive, explicit, etc - use your best judgment - but don’t feel like you have to get super dressed and be uncomfortable all day. Enjoy being home and wear your sweatpants!
• It’s okay to eat on calls if it’s your dinner or lunch time, we do it all the time in the Boston office! Just mute your mic, chewing sounds are gross!!!!

Equipment

• Make sure that you machine is properly enrolled in Intune and has VPN access before attempting to work from home
• Make sure you have at least one of your comm tools (email, teams, slack) on your phone in addition to your laptop, so that you can let people know whats up if you lose power/internet at your home.
• Keep your laptop batteries charged.
• Get mobile with unlimited data if possible.
• Stock up on necessary dongles, adapters, cords, and wires. Lack of necessary connectors can decrease your productivity.
• Consider a headset for calls, specially ones with an easy to access mute button and fold down mic. It really can improve the quality of your audio. Webcams, specially those not at keyboard level (pointing up your nose) are also important.

Lifestyle

• Take a little time to make your work environment pleasant. If you’re working in a mop closet with no windows, or the spare-room-equivalent thereof, you probably won’t be that productive. We’re complex beings. Put a plant on your desk, get some music going, clean.
• You may wish to have a conversation with your kids that goes something like this: “Now, when I’m at my desk this week, it means I’m working. I can be interrupted a little bit sometimes, but most of the time I’ll need to be able to concentrate.”
  • You may wish to choose a work place in your house with a door to make this more explicit for children. “When this door is shut I am at work and you need to find your other parent”
• EAT. You’ll forget to eat when you’re not surrounded by huge cafeterias or a team of people asking you what you want to do for lunch.
• Working remotely can be lonely sometimes. Find a way to reproduce the feeling of that office chatter, or the casual hallway/water-cooler conversation. Music, podcast, background TV noise (when appropriate), etc.
• Get some fresh air from time to time. Normally when you’re at the office you’re walking to/from the office and from your building to the cafeteria for coffee or lunch so you get outside quite a bit, but when working from home and the kitchen is just downstairs, you can very easily go a few days without actually leaving the house. It doesn’t need to be far, and with COVID19 around it probably shouldn’t be, but maybe sit on your porch while you drink your coffee, it helps clear the lungs and the head.
• Good light is important. Having good lighting closer to natural light wavelengths makes the environment much more pleasant.
• Build a routine of specific cues to help you switch into “work mode”. For example, you may still get dressed as you would if you were heading into the office to put you into the right mindset for the day.
• Get interesting drinks and snacks!!! If you drink 12 cans of seltzer a day, make sure you have seltzer in your fridge. If you like getting peanut M&Ms from the team room at 2pm, grab some for your home! You’d be surprised how boring your regular drinks are when you’re used to fridges filled with flavorful things and a huge tea selection etc.

Things to avoid

• If you are in a meeting room with other folks, try to keep side conversations and noises to a minimum. Imagine you are sitting in the center of the table and hear the things closes to the mic the loudest, because that’s how it is for anyone calling in.
• Don’t sit right next to the microphone if you are going to be taking notes on a loud keyboard. It will drown out every voice in the room.
• Don’t disclose sensitive information if there are others in your home office when you’re in a meeting. Generally speaking, it’s better to be using headphones if others are around.
• Don’t direct a question to more than one individual at a time. This can be mildly awkward in person, but over a call it becomes nearly impossible to figure out who will speak first without any of the visual/bodily cues we normally rely on to resolve speaking order conflicts.
• Don’t use whiteboards unless they are clearly visible to the room camera (and even then it can be tricky to see). Digital mediums present in Teams are always going to be superior for folks who are calling in.

What are your tips?

Sponsor: This week's sponsor is...me! This blog and my podcast has been a labor of love for over 18 years. Your sponsorship pays my hosting bills for both AND allows me to buy gadgets to review AND the occasional taco. Join me!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

By now I hope you've installed Windows Terminal. If not, go do that, I'll wait. It's time.

You may also have customize your settings. If you tried terminal a few versions ago and haven't gone back in, it's also time to let the Windows Terminal generate you a nice fresh new profiles.json (settings file). It's OK to zero-out/delete yours. Windows Terminal will regenerate it when it next starts.

I have a number of things in my Terminal dropdown. It looks like this.

However, I'd like to be able to have a profile that ssh's into Linux machines that I use regularly. Perhaps those remote machine can have their own cool menu item? Let's see what that would look like and how we'd do it.

Adding a New Profile to Windows Terminal

Click the down arrow in the Windows Terminal top tab bar. Note that there are a ton of great and useful settings so explore the Settings Schema, and when you're editing the settings make sure that Visual Studio Code is set as your default handler for .json files. That's important because the Windows Terminal settings profile.json includes a JSON Schema and you'll want your settings to have autocomplete/intellisense. This will make it easier to create and discover new settings.

I'll add a profile to the "profiles" array. To start, and to learn, let's add the simplest possible profile! I'm just adding the { } as an array item in the larger profiles [] and giving it a name.

"profiles": [
    {
      "name":  "This is a name"
    },

This will make a new menu item in Windows Terminal with the same name. It will have no icon and it'll launch cmd.exe as the default shell because I didn't set any other command line! It I add it at the top (as the first) item in the profiles array it'll also appear first in the menu and have the hotkey Ctrl+Shift+1.

This is lame, so let's add more. I'll add a tabTitle and a commandline.

    {
      "name":  "This is a name",
      "tabTitle": "This is a tab title",
      "commandline": "powershell"
    },

This menu item will appear as "This is a name" in the menu, but the the tab will be called "This is a tab title." It'll launch powershell. Note that I didn't include .exe even though I could have. I wanted to make sure you're clear that Windows Terminal is basically just called Process.Start so you can set a profile tab to call anything in the PATH, or you can be explicit. I could also add "startingDirectory" and a bunch of other options.

Since I can call anything in the PATH, what else can I get away with?

Using OpenSSH on Windows

You may not have heard but OpenSSH has shipped in Windows for a few years now. That means that a lot of the utilities that you might have installed Putty for are already available in Windows. You can open an admin PowerShell and run one command to ensure OpenSSH's client apps are there:

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Client~~~~0.0.1.0

This installs the the client, but there's an optional server as well if you'd like.

I'm going to focus only on the client. Skip to the next area if you want to do your SSH'ing from Linux, not Windows.

Here's what's installed in c:\windows\System32\OpenSSH

Here we've got sftp, scp, and most importantly, ssh.exe and ssh-agent. Since ssh is in the PATH when it's installed with Windows I can change my Windows Terminal profile to look like this and log into my Raspberry Pi 4.

{
  "name":  "ssh hanselPi4",
  "tabTitle": "HanselPi4",
  "commandline": "ssh pi@hanselpi4"
},

Note in this screenshot I've got the ssh connection listed at the top, and when I click on it it opens ssh.exe and prompts me for a password. I have no ssh keys on my system that would enable auto-login, hence the password is needed.

Automatically SSH'ing/logging into a Linux machine from a Windows Terminal profile

Now this is important, so pay attention. If you have WSL or WSL already on your machine you can certainly just use the SSH keys and utils that are included in your preferred Linux distro.

In that case, your command line in your Windows Terminal profile would be something like:

wsl ssh pi@hanselpi4

or if you want a specific distro, you can launch a distro and ssh from there.

wsl -d Ubuntu-18.04 ssh pi@hanselpi4

If you know Linux, then you're familiar with how to set up your public keys to allow this. However, most folks think you need Putty or some 3rd party tool to do this on Windows so I'll focus on how do to that here.

I want to be able to type "ssh pi@hanselpi4" from my Windows machine and automatically be logged in. More specifically I want to click the profile and have it Just Work.

I will

• Make a key on my Window machine. The FROM machine, in this case, Windows. Then I want to ssh FROM here TO the remote Linux machine.
• Tell the Linux machine (by transferring it over) about the public piece of my key and add it to a specific user's allowed_keys.

I'll run ssh-keygen to make a key from my command line on Windows. I just hit enter to generate it but you can make your own filename if you want, just use the full path and make sure you keep track of where things are. Defaults are usually best.

>ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (C:\Users\scott/.ssh/id_rsa): 
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in hanselpi4.
Your public key has been saved in hanselpi4.pub.

Remember the path is c:\users\yourname because that's the Windows equivalent of the ~ home folder and the keys are in c:\users\yourname\.ssh.

Now I want to transfer what's in id_rsa.pub over to my Raspberry Pi. You can scp (secure copy) if you want, but it's best to append the key to the authorized_keys file on the destination machine.

NOTE: I'm type'ing (cat on Linux is type on Windows) that text file out and piping it into SSH where I login that remote machine with the user pi and I then cat (on the Linux side now) and append >> that text to the .ssh/authorized_keys folder. The ~ folder is implied but could be added if you like.

Run this command once on Windows to output your key and pipe it over to, and append to, the right file on your remote Linux machine. You'll be prompted for your password once.

type c:\users\scott\.ssh\id_rsa.pub | ssh pi@hanselpi4 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

Make sure you understand what's happening in the line above.

Adding a profile Icon - the raspberry on top

At this point I can click the menu item in Windows Terminal and automatically be ssh'ed/logged into the remote terminal. But, scandalously, the Terminal menu item has no icon. This is clearly unacceptable M$sft sucks, right? I'll go get a nice 32x32 Raspberry Pi Icon and put it somewhere. You might put yours in a Dropbox or OneDrive so they are available everywhere you go.

Now my profile looks like this:

"profiles": [
{
  "name": "ssh hanselPi4",
  "tabTitle": "HanselPi4",
  "commandline": "ssh pi@hanselpi4",
  "icon": "c:/users/scott/downloads/icons8-raspberry-pi-32.png"
},

How lovely is this?

Looks good, has a nice title and icon, and I can use a hotkey to automatically SSH into my remote machine.

One final note, you've already got the Azure Cloud Shell in the Windows Terminal (you can get there for free at http://shell.azure.com in your browser and access a free Linux container anywhere anytime with a persistent cloud drive) but now you can follow the instructions in this post and set up one-click SSH to anywhere.

Hope this is useful!

Sponsor: This week's sponsor is...me! This blog and my podcast has been a labor of love for over 18 years. Your sponsorship pays my hosting bills for both AND allows me to buy gadgets to review AND the occasional taco. Join me!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

I've written about WSL2 and it's glorious wonders many times. As its release (presumably) grows closer - as of this writing it's on Windows Insiders Slow and Fast - I wanted to update a few posts. I've blogged about a few cool thing around WSL and Docker

• Docker Desktop for WSL 2 integrates Windows 10 and Linux even closer
• Remote Debugging a .NET Core Linux app in WSL2 from Visual Studio on Windows
• Cool WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) tips and tricks you (or I) didn't know were possible
• Ruby on Rails on Windows is not just possible, it's fabulous using WSL2 and VS Code
• Easily move WSL distributions between Windows 10 machines with import and export!
• What's the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell?

Here's a little HanselFAQ and some resources.

I want to run Linux on Windows

You can certainly use HyperV or VirtualBox and run a standard Virtual Machine. Download an ISO and mount it and run "a square within a square." It won't be seamlessly integrated within Windows - it'll be like the movie Inception - but it's time-tested.

Better yet, install WSL or WSL2. It'll take 5-10 minutes tops if your Windows 10 is somewhat up to date.

• How to install WSL on Windows 10
  • WSL doesn't include a Linux kernel. Its Linux file system access is kinda slow, but it accesses Windows files super fast. If you use Cygwin, you'll love this, because it's really Linux, just the kernel is emulated.
• How to install WSL2 on Windows 10
  • WSL2 ships an actual Linux kernel and its Linux file system is 5x-10x faster than WSL. WSL2 uses a tiny utility VM that expands contracts its memory and you can manage distros with the wsl command line.
  • Do all your development work inside here, while still using VS Code on Windows. It's amazing. Watch me set up a friend with WSL2, LIVE on YouTube.

I want to SSH into Linux stuff from Windows

There's 15 years of websites telling you to install Putty but you might not need it. OpenSSH has been shipping in Windows 10 for over two years. You can add them with Windows Features, or if you like, grab a release and put it on your PATH.

You can also do things like set up keys to use Windows 10's built-in OpenSSH to automatically SSH into a remote Linux machine. I also like to setup Signed Git Commits with a YubiKey NEO and GPG and Keybase on Windows.

I need a better Terminal in Windows

The new Windows Terminal is for you. Download Windows Terminal now for free. It's open source. You can then run the Win64/Win32 ssh from above, or run any Linux distros SSH. Have fun. It's time.

NOTE: Have you already downloaded the Terminal, maybe a while back? Enough has changed that you should delete your profiles.json and start over.

You can download the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. There's also an unofficial Chocolatey release. I recommend the Store version if possible.

My prompt and fonts are ugly

Make them pretty. You deserve the best. Go get Cascadia Code's CascadiaPL.ttf and PowerLine and buckle up buttercup. Get a nice theme and maybe a GIF background.

I want to use Docker on Windows and I want it to not suck

Surprise, it's actually awesome. You may have had some challenges with Docker a few years ago on Windows and gave up, but come back. There's been a huge (and fascinating) architecture of Docker on Windows. It's very nicely integrated if you have WSL2.

If you have WSL2 set up nicely, then get Docker Desktop WSL2. This version of Docker for Windows uses WSL2 as its engine allowing you to share your docker context across Windows and Linux on the same machine! As the maker intended!

WSL 2 introduces a significant architectural change as it is a full Linux kernel built by Microsoft, allowing Linux containers to run natively without emulation. With Docker Desktop running on WSL 2, users can leverage Linux workspaces and avoid having to maintain both Linux and Windows build scripts.

So that means

1. Install Windows 10 Insider Preview build 19018 or higher
2. Enable WSL 2 feature on Windows. For detailed instructions, refer to the Microsoft documentation.
3. Download Docker Desktop Edge 2.1.6.0 or a later release.

Ensure your default WSL instances is WSL2. You can do that with wsl -l -v, and then wsl --set-version  <distro> 2

Then within Docker Desktop for Windows you've got two things to check. First, are you using WSL2 as your backend?

And then, the often missed setup, check under Resources | WSL Integration and tell Docker which WSL2 distros you want to use to access Docker. If you're paying attention you may notice that Docker Desktop tries to prompt you with a notification in Action Center but you might miss it.

NOTE: If you used an early Tech Preview, you might have an extra now-vestigial Docker context named "wsl." You want to use the Default one, not the WSL one.

This isn't intuitive or obvious and you might get weird errors like these

docker wsl open //./pipe/docker_wsl: The system cannot find the file specified.

or

error during connect: Get http://%2F%2F.%2Fpipe%2Fdocker_wsl/v1.40/images/json?all=1: open //./pipe/docker_wsl: The system cannot find the file specified.

You can see if you have an extra context from before like below. That "wsl" one is older (if you have it) and you want to use default in both Windows and WSL2.

docker context ls
NAME                DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT                  KUBERNETES ENDPOINT      
default *           Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   npipe:////./pipe/docker_engine   https://kubernetes.docker
wsl                 Docker daemon hosted in WSL 2             npipe:////./pipe/docker_wsl

I actually removed that one to avoid confusion with docker context rm wsl.

Here's Ubuntu on my Windows machine

And here's my Windows machine. Note that docker images in both instances returns the same list. They are the same Docker backend!

I want to code in VS Code on Windows but compile on Linux

At this point once I've set things up I can go bananas. I can do Container-based development, where I use VS Code to run all my developer tools and builds insider a container...maybe I never event install Go or PHP or .NET Core. It's all just inside a container.

Oh, by the way, please Subscribe to my YouTube! I talk a lot about this stuff over there.

Sponsor: Couchbase gives developers the power of SQL with the flexibility of JSON. Start using it today for free with technologies including Kubernetes, Java, .NET, JavaScript, Go, and Python.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Four years ago I wrote how to BUILD (literally compile) Visual Studio Code for a Raspberry Pi ARM machine. Just a few months later in November, community member Jay Rodgers released his labor of love - nightly builds of VS Code for Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi.

If you want to get unofficial builds of Visual Studio Code running on a Raspberry Pi (I know you have one!) you should use his instructions. He has done a lot of work to make this very simple. Head over to http://code.headmelted.com/ and make it happen for yourself, now!

Jay says:

I've maintained the project for a few years now and it has expanded from providing binaries for Pi to providing support and tools to get VS Code running on low-end ARM devices that might not otherwise support it like Chromebooks (which make up about 60% of the devices in schools now).

The project has really taken off among educators (beyond what I would have thought), not least because they're restricted to the devices provided and it gives them a route to teach coding to students on these computers that might not otherwise be there.

Again, Jay is doing this out of love for the community and the work that makes it happen is hosted at https://github.com/headmelted/codebuilds. I'd encourage you to head over there right now and give him a STAR.

There's so many community members out there doing "thankless" work. Thank them. Thank them with a thank you email, a donation, or just your kindness when you file an issue and complain about all the free work they do for you.

I just picked up a Raspberry Pi 4 from Amazon, and I was able to get a community build of VS Code running on it easily!

Open a terminal, run "sudo -s" and then this script (again, the script is open source):

. <( wget -O - https://code.headmelted.com/installers/apt.sh )

Jay has done the work! That's just the apt instructions, but he's got Chrome OS, APT, YUM, and a manual option over at http://code.headmelted.com/!

Thank you for making this so much easier for us all.

Love Raspberry Pis? Here's some fun stuff you can do with the Raspberry that you bought, the one you meant to do fun stuff with, and the one in your junk drawer. DO IT!

• How to set up a Raspberry Pi 3 from scratch (with video)!
• How to build a Wall Mounted Family Calendar and Dashboard with a Raspberry Pi and cheap monitor
• How to Build a Kubernetes Cluster with ARM Raspberry Pi then run .NET Core on OpenFaas
• Building, Running, and Testing .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 2.1 in Docker on a Raspberry Pi (ARM32)
• Installing the .NET Core 2.x SDK on a Raspberry Pi and Blinking an LED with System.Device.Gpio
• Remote debugging with VS Code on Windows to a Raspberry Pi using .NET Core on ARM
• Many Raspberry Pi projects - How can you not love a tiny computer?
• You can even install this week's sponsor Couchbase on a Raspberry Pi!

Enjoy!

Sponsor: Couchbase gives developers the power of SQL with the flexibility of JSON. Start using it today for free with technologies including Kubernetes, Java, .NET, JavaScript, Go, and Python.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

It's time. It's the feature complete release of the Windows Terminal. Stop reading, and go install it. I'll wait here. You done? OK.

You can download the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. There's also an unofficial Chocolatey release. I recommend the Store version if possible.

NOTE: Have you already downloaded the Terminal, maybe a while back? Enough has changed that you should delete your profiles.json and start over.

BIG NOTE: Educate yourself about the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell. This isn't a new "DOS Prompt." Windows Terminal is the view into whatever shell makes you happy.

What's new? A lot. At this point this is the end of the new features before 1.0 though, and now it's all about bug fixes and rock solid stability.

So you've downloaded the Windows Terminal...now what?

You might initially be underwhelmed. This is a Terminal, it's not going to hold your hand.

The Documentation is just getting started but you can start here! This would be a great way for you to get involved in Open Source, by the way!

• Windows Terminal User Documentation
• Settings are expressed as JSON. You will be more successful if your JSON file editor is something like Visual Studio Code and supports JSON Schema so you'll get intellisense.
  • Check your defaults! Here is my profile.json (which is by no means perfect). I set the requestedTheme, alwaysShowTabs, and my defaultProfile (what shell is the starter shell?)
• Assert and decide on your keybindings. Windows Terminal is very configurable.
  • Any key you press can likely be remapped.
• Are the fonts and colors the way you want them?
  • There are a few terminal themes at https://terminalsplash.com/
  • There are dozens and dozens of iTerm2 Terminal themes here and images of them are here 
• Take it to the next level? Explore background images
  • You can set background images or even animated gifs AND change them at runtime.
• Assert your startingDirectory
  • If you are using WSL you might want your starting directory to be ~ on the Linux file system.
• You can still use Far, GitBash, Cygwin, or cmder if you want! Read the docs!

Here's the big new change that is very exciting!

Windows Terminal Command Line Arguments

You may know you can run Windows Terminal with "wt.exe" and this version now supports Command line arguments! Here's an examples to give you a taste:

• wt ; split-pane -p "Windows PowerShell" ; split-pane -H wsl.exe
• wt -d .
• wt -d c:\github

At this point you can get as advanced as you want. Make other icons, pin them to the taskbar, have a blast. There's subcommands like new-tab, split-pane, and focus-tab.ter

Other Windows Terminal things to note

• I'm also working on a "Open Windows Terminal Here" INF that will add a menu item to your Explorer right click menu (until one day it's included out of the box).
• It's also worth pointing out that the Cascadia Code font comes with multiple "flavors."
• I did a video showing a Mac/Linux person how to set up the Windows Terminal plus WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and it turned out really well. I encourage you to check it out.

Please share YOUR blogs, YOUR profiles, YOUR favorite themes and terminal hacks as well!

---

Sponsor: Have you tried developing in Rider yet? This fast and feature-rich cross-platform IDE improves your code for .NET, ASP.NET, .NET Core, Xamarin, and Unity applications on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Comment on this post [27]

Share on BlueSky or use the Permalink and post anywhere!