Windows Terminal

A new version of Windows Terminal was released recently (V0.9) as as it edges closer towards a final V1 release I thought I would download it and give it a proper go.

You can do all sorts of fancy stuff with this tool, and it looks gorgeous, but right out the gate there are only three things I wanted it to do:

1. Have the CMD prompt be the default terminal that opens on launch (the default setting is powershell)
2. Have the CMD prompt window open to a different, default folder location
3. have the CMD prompt window open an instance of the Developer Command Prompt that ships with Build Tools / Visual Studio 2019

All of these things were very easy to do.

Grab Windows Terminal from the Store (there is also a version up for grabs via chocolatey but i’m not sure how official that is) Fire it up, point to down arrow on the top bar, click Settings and your profiles.json file will open up.

To have the default prompt be CMD (or whatever you want) simply copy the relevant guid from your terminal list and past it into the “defaultProfile” property near the top of the file.

For the other 2, copy and paste this entry into your profiles list along with the others:

{
	"guid": "{0caa0dad-35be-5f56-a8ff-afceeeaa6101}",
    "name": "cmd - VS2019 Developer Prompt",
    "commandline": "cmd.exe /k \"%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2019\\Professional\\Common7\\Tools\\VsDevCmd.bat\"",
    "startingDirectory": "%USERPROFILE%\\some\\other\\folder",
    "hidden": false
}

Edit as necessary, hit Ctrl+S and voila!

Yes, i’m well aware I should be getting more friendly with Powershell, but there is code to write!