Add Git Bash & VS Dev Cmd Prompt Profiles to Windows Terminal

I admit I was not too impressed with the early beta versions of Windows Terminal, maybe because I use Cmder as my daily terminal driver and its features are excellent. However since Windows Terminal reached RTM at v1.0 it does seem a better quality product and with the demo at MS Build 2021 of the new features coming soon I can see that my number one feature request will be released soon - Quake Mode! Quake Mode enables the terminal to drop down from the top of screen on a keypress and as it is a feature of Cmder I use it every day to show/hide the terminal for those quick actions.

Windows Terminal does need some tweaking to get it to look and behave to my tastes, and unfortunately it still doesnt have a proper opacity setting (we have to make do with the smudgy ‘arcylic’ setting instead, but with some it is highly customisable via the settings.json file and settings UI. One thing that you can do is to add your own profiles, so I added my own profile for GitBash.

Assuming you have GitBash installed (via Git) then the below config should work but you’ll need to check your paths. Add this section to your profiles list in the settings.json file which can be found by opening Windows Terminal, choose ‘settings’ from the dropdown, then click the settings icon, the json file will then open. It is usually located somewhere like C:\<YOURUSERNAME>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState.

{
 "closeOnExit": "always",
 "commandline": "C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe -I -l",
 "icon": "C:\Program Files\Git\mingw64\share\git\git-for-windows.ico",
 "name": "GitBash",
 "startingDirectory": "%USERPROFILE%",
 "tabTitle": "GitBash"
}

Its also useful to add a profile for the Developer Command Promp_t _for VS 2019, like this:

{
 "name": "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2019",
 "commandline": "%comspec%  /k \"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat\"",
 "icon": "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\Assets\VisualStudio.70x70.contrast-standard_scale-180.png",
 "tabTitle": "Dev Cmd VS 2019"
}

This snippet assumes Visual Studio community edition is installed, if using Enterprise then correct the file paths to /Enterprise/ instead of /Community/. If you’re using Cmder and want to read how to add the Developer Command prompt to Cmder check out this post here.

To see the whole file check out my GitHub repo where I’ll keep my latest config file (whilst I remember to update) at https://github.com/RichHewlett/windows-terminal-config.