Make your terminal smarter with PowerShell and Set-Location
| CommentsOn this lazy Sunday morning I was catching up among the feeds and saw Scott Hanselman’s post about customizing Windows Terminal a bit more. I had already done this a while back and got my terminal all fancy looking with those cool Powerline fonts and such.
It’s a simple thing, but actually does make my experience a bit nicer to work in the terminal environment. I’m not really a CLI kind of person – it’s growing on me though – so these customizations help make it more pleasing to me. I use PowerShell (PowerShell Core to be specific) as my default shell. I use it because I like the ability of some of the modules from time to time that enable me to do some quick things working with Azure. Scott’s post had a step to customize basically your startup script for PowerShell. You can get to this from your shell by typing:
notepad $PROFILE
from a PowerShell prompt.
NOTE: PowerShell and PowerShell Core do NOT share the same profile script, so if you want similar customizations for both, you need to edit both profiles. The $PROFILE trick above will take you to the right startup profile script for each shell.
As I inspected mine, I was reminded of my favorite command: Set-Location. It’s simple but it will let you basically create aliases to quickly move to directories. Take a look in action for me. While I do have a startup directory configured for Windows Terminal, it’s nice to quickly navigate around.
So for me I’ve got a few quick shortcuts to get to some most-used directories while working in Terminal. Here’s mine that I have:
# Helper function to change directory to my development workspace function source { Set-Location c:\\users\\timheuer\\documents\\github } function ghroot { Set-Location c:\\users\\timheuer\\documents\\github } function sroot { Set-Location c:\\users\timheuer\\source\\repos } function dl { Set-Location c:\\users\\timheuer\\downloads } function desk { Set-Location c:\\users\\timheuer\\desktop } function od { Set-Location c:\\users\\timheuer\\OneDrive }
It’s dumb simple, but it saves me keystrokes when I’m working in Terminal and moving back and forth. What’s your favorite tips to use in Terminal?