Setting Up a Modern Windows Terminal for Developers in A Few Steps

Somebody asks me to guide them setting up the better terminal for development as below

I answered to them several times, and I would like another people to use some kind of cool terminal just like this. So I documented it down in this post.

I combine between Windows Terminal (1.11.2921), nushell (0.38.0), and starship (0.58.0) on Windows 10 machine.

You can find the references at:

• Windows Terminal: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal/9n0dx20hk701
• NuShell: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=nushell
• Starship: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=Starship

After installing all of them on your Windows OS machine, you need to go to Nerd Font (https://www.nerdfonts.com) and install fonts there to have a better icons on your Windows Terminal.

Some of configuration, you need to set to make sure nushell can integrate good with starship as below

Go to Windows Terminal settings, and open the settings file as

Then make sure you add the settings for nushell

{
    "commandline": "nu.exe",
    "fontFace": "Fira Code",
    "guid": "{2b372ca1-1ee2-403d-a839-6d63077ad871}",
    "hidden": false,
    "name": "Nu Shell"
}

Notes: you need to make sure you edit your nushell settings via JSON settings, and in there, you can change it to Fira Code font as above. That is really important unless you will get some of un-known characters on your terminal.

And final step, you need to open up the C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\nushell\nu\config, and find config.toml (if there is no config.toml, then you have to create one). And putting some of configuration for it as following

prompt = "starship prompt"
startup = [
    "alias ll = ls -la",
    "alias d = docker",
    "alias nw = cd D:\\github\\northwind-minimal-apis"
]

The config for starship is at C:\Users\<your_username>\.starship\config.toml, but you don't need to put anything more :)

Close all current terminal windows, and open it up again.
Happy hacking!!!