5 time-saving tools for Windows terminal

Microsoft included a new Terminal app with the 2022 update of Windows 11, and it quickly became one of my go-to apps. Before Terminal, you had to load PowerShell, Command Prompt, and WSL windows separately, which made me want to avoid using the command-line on Windows whenever possible. The Terminal app unifies all those shells and the apps I run inside them save me a lot of time.

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1

Winget

Installing software on Windows the traditional way is a hassle. You have to browse the web and hunt down installer packages, download them, and then manually run through a setup wizard to install them on your machine. It’s a needlessly convoluted process. Plus, you might end up installing an infected .exe or .msi package or other software might get installed alongside your target app (remember those browser toolbars everybody had back in the day?) Uninstalling or upgrading apps takes just as much work.

Linux handles software installation and updates so much better. On Linux, you just have to punch in a command and sit back while the operating system installs and authenticates the software for you. It’s fully automated and when the command stops running, your software is ready for use. The tools that allow you to install and update software in this manner are called package managers.

Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek

Microsoft recently took a page out of this playbook and introduced its own command-line package manager. It’s called ‘winget.’ Using winget, you can install, uninstall, and update apps with a single command. Instead of going online, downloading the Firefox installer and running it manually, I can just paste this command into the terminal, hit Enter, and watch Windows automatically download and install Firefox for me.

winget install Mozilla Firefox

Removing software is just as easy.

winget uninstall Mozilla Firefox

To update, simply run:

winget upgrade Mozilla Firefox

Winget is preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11, and it features over 10,000 packages as of now.

2

Windows Subsystem for Linux

In modern versions of Windows, you don’t need to spin up virtual machines just to install and run Linux software. The Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL, allows you to run Linux boxes in the Windows Terminal. You can choose from a number of Linux distributions and run them inside the Windows Terminal with near-native performance. It even supports GUI apps now, so you can seamlessly install and run any Linux app within a Windows environment. It’s so much faster and easier than running entire virtual machines inside Windows.

Credit: Microsoft

I have Ubuntu and Arch WSL boxes running on my Windows machine. WSL also supports Debian, Kali Linux, Alpine, openSUSE, and Fedora. The Windows Terminal makes it easy to switch between them. You just have to click the caret icon next to the tab button and choose from all the installer profiles. You can also work side-by-side on Windows and Linux shells, each on their own tab.

3

Command palette

I’m a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts and the Terminal app on Windows has excellent keyboard support. You can drive it entirely with a keyboard thanks to the command palette. You can press Ctrl+Shift+P or click the menu button next to the tab icon to pull up the command palette. It’ll show a long list of actions you can quickly perform just by selecting a command palette item. You can type to search through the commands.

For example, you can type ‘color scheme’ to quickly change the terminal theme. You can create multiple panes within the terminal (multiplex) by typing ‘pane.’ There are shortcuts for these actions too, neatly labeled next to the items in the command palette selection. The more you use it, the more fluent you become with the Windows Terminal.

4

Terminal commands that replace web apps

Ever since I started relying on terminal commands instead of websites for simple things like checking the weather, creating secure passwords, converting files, etc., I find myself using the Windows Terminal often. For example, checking the weather is as simple as running this command.

curl wttr.in

I can run an internet speed test in the terminal faster than I can in the browser. With the Speedtest-cli installed, I just enter this command, and it prints my internet speed almost instantly.

speedtest

I also use my Windows Terminal as a calculator and conversion tool. It shows results in real-time, which is faster than looking it up in a search engine in my experience. Also, I use ‘yt-dlp’ to download videos from YouTube, and the command-line version in the Windows Terminal works best for me.

5

Faster file copying and moving

When you’re moving a few small files around, you might not realize it, but File Explorer really struggles with big files and folders. It’s doubly true when you’re moving those files between drives. If you’ve ever tried moving a folder with a thousand items, you have no doubt experienced this. I recently found out that the Terminal is perfect for this job. The ‘mv’ command, which moves files between directories, is supposedly twice as fast as File Explorer, especially when a huge number of files is involved.

I tried moving a 10GB folder with a bunch of heavy files, and it took just about a minute with the ‘mv’ command inside the terminal. However, when moving the same file using Explorer, it took about 1 minute 45 seconds. You can extrapolate from there for even heavier files.

Command Prompt, the original command-line console on Windows, is barely usable, and I went out of my way to avoid it. The new Terminal app is a much-needed improvement, and it’s actually fun to use my favorite command-line tools on it.