It took me around 30 hours to investigate and configure all of these tools on MacOS and Windows WSL. I'll also show settings to change, aliases and scripts that will make the terminal more productive for you. New cat (bat) on the same file - syntax highlighting and formattingīut tooling is just half the story. New ls (Exa) - git aware with icons and colour hints Let's go! A quick look at default Vs modern terminal tools This article also explains all the tools I use and how I keep the same terminal setup consistent on MacOS and Windows! Keeping any shell changes you make on one machine up to date on all the machines you code on is a nightmare without the right tooling. Keeping developer experience consistent across machines Terminal prompts can be made git aware and use colour to indicate state so you don't have to query git so often. You can replace tools like ls or cat with modern equivalents that support full colour, unicode icons, git state and more. But other developer tooling has advanced quite a bit since then. Many of the terminal tools that come with unix environments are functionally similar to how they were 20 years ago. The latest version lets you run a full Ubuntu instance that integrates seamlessly with the underlying windows instance.īy using WSL2 you can have a (mostly) identical developer experience jumping between MacOS and Windows. Windows 'WSL' (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is a great tool for this you can use on Windows 10 and newer. I need to use the same tools and the same experience on both. I regularly code on both MacOS and Windows machines and I was always annoyed how different the default experiences are on each.

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