Fun with Windows Terminal - Roaming Profiles

JJ Bussert

04/04/2020

Clearly I'm a big fan of the Windows Terminal but what i'm not a huge fan of is repeating myself. As a consultant at any point in time I may have several different computers to work with and although the steps aren't terribly complicated it can be frustrating to try and keep multiple terminal profiles synchronized across several different computers. In addition to synchronization of the profiles it also seemed like others may enjoy seeing what I have configured to start their own setup from here, so enter my Github terminal repository.

The easy part of the equation was using Github, a public vehicle for sharing code with the world but getting the settings out of the default user profile directories wasn't quite as straight forward. One requirement I had was a fairly dummy-proof way of syncing everything up without trying to remember what I changed, where the change was, and when I applied changes last if it's a system I don't use regularly.

Here are the scripts that I came up with, you can find these along with the icons and backgrounds at my terminal github repository.

Clone Repo locally

cd c:\_
md c:\_\_terminal
git clone https://github.com/jjbussert/terminal _terminal
cd c:\_\_terminal

This needs to be done once, feel free to clone mine directly or copy/fork what I started to make your own!

hardlinks.ps1

if(Test-Path Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1) 
{ 
   Remove-Item Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 
}
New-Item `
   -Name Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 `
   -ItemType HardLink `
   -Value $env:HOME\Documents\Powershell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 

if(Test-Path profiles.json) 
{ 
   Remove-Item profiles.json 
}
New-Item `
   -Name profiles.json `
   -ItemType HardLink `
   -Value $env:HOME\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_*\LocalState\profiles.json
 
  • [1-3 & 10-12] : There are two files that we want to synchronize on our host system, these 2 if blocks will remove the files and setup hard links to those files in their locations in the $env:HOME directory where the shells expect them to be
  • [5-8] : This is the profile configuration of powershell core
  • [14-17] : this is the json containing the profiles for Windows Terminal itself

The key consideration for this script is to be able to execute it and either initialize the environment or upgrade it if this has already been run before. This script sets up hard links to the key files if they haven't already been setup, this way I can use git to synchronize files involved.

Conclusion

And that's it! Now keeping multiple system profiles in sync is a simple as a git pull just like you are likely already using in your day to day work. These steps are specifically about the host Windows system but you can easily do something similar for the WSL distros to sync the .bashrc files.

So what do you think of the repository for my Windows Terminal setup? Did you copy/clone your own? What adjustments did you make to your setup? Share in the comments below!

Special thanks to unsplash-logoLuca Bravo for the photo used in this post!