Make your terminal smarter with PowerShell and Set-Location

On 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?