Make your console look amazing and use Linux commands on Windows 11 and older

Mateusz Domagala — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 23:35:21 +0000

Some people use a graphical interface for interaction with their repositories, others do not break up with the console. Personally, I belong to the second group and despite many tries, even to paid apps, I remain faithful to the good old console.

The original windows console design drives me crazy, and I could not use it every day. After switching to Windows 11 I tried a few terminals provided by Microsoft Store i.e. Windows Terminal or Fluent Terminal. In this article, I’ll show you how to make your console look modern, stylish for you to enjoy the view and have fun using it.

At first, you need to download ConEmu. Accordingly to the creators

ConEmu-Maximus5 aims to be a handy, comprehensive, fast and reliable terminal window where you may host any console application developed either for WinAPI (cmd, powershell, far) or Unix PTY (cygwin, msys, wsl bash).

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve used several consoles, but it’s ConEmu that has kept me coming back to it happily. It’s very flexible and configurable!
ConEmu can be downloaded directly from the developer's website here.

The process of installing the application is very simple and requires no additional description, it’s mostly limited to clicking the “next” buttons.

In my case, it’s Git bash.

By the way, you can change the console color scheme here:

I like this one.
And the transparency here:

Optional: Installation of “oh-my-bash” feature

In this section, we will take a look at installing a framework that will make your terminal more colorful and readable.

Disclaimer: Oh My Bash works best on macOS and Linux.

But, don’t worry, it works well on Windows as well.
Open your ConEmu console and paste this command:

git clone git://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash.git ~/.oh-my-bash

Once the repository is downloaded, go to C:/Users/{your_username}/ _and find a file named “.bashrc_”. If you can’t see the file, enable the visibility of hidden files in your File Explorer settings.

Open the file and find the line containing this sequence:
OSH_THEME="some_value"

Choose a style you like the most from here and enter its name in the line given above e.g.

OSH_THEME="agnoster"

Save the file and reopen your console.

Conclusion and handy tip

I don’t like using graphical interfaces when managing a repo, and I always use the console.
Maybe using the console will not make you a better developer, but it can make you feel like one!

Tip:
If you want to display a simple one-line commit history of a branch in a clear way, use a very catchy command:

git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph

More info you can find here:

https://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash
https://conemu.github.io/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1057564/pretty-git-branch-graphs

DEV Community: Mateusz Domagala

Make your console look amazing and use Linux commands on Windows 11 and older