NeilSeligmann/FluentTerminal

A Terminal Emulator based on UWP and web technologies.

Fluent Terminal

A Terminal Emulator based on UWP and web technologies.

Features

• Terminal for PowerShell, CMD, WSL or custom shells
• Supports tabs and multiple windows
• Theming and appearance configuration
• Import/Export themes
• Import iTerm themes
• Fullscreen mode
• Editable keybindings
• Search function
• Configure shell profiles to quickly switch between different shells
• Explorer context menu integration (Installation script can be found here)

Screenshots

Up Next

• Launch shell profile with a custom defined keybinding
• Copy&Paste options
• Improved tabs
• Split screen support

How to install

• Enable sideloading apps
  • Alternatively, enable developer mode if you plan to do UWP app development. For most users that do not intend to do UWP app development, developer mode will not be necessary.
• Install the *.cer file into Local Machine -> Trusted Root Certification Authorities
• double click the *.appxbundle
• Optional: Install Context menu integration from here

How to build

• Grab the latest NodeJS 8.x installer, and install ensuring that both NPM and "install into system PATH" are checked during the install process.
• Grab the latest Visual Studio 2017 Community installer and install (See next section)
• Enable developer mode in Windows 10

Visual Studio 2017 Configuration

• Under "Workloads" select:
  • Universal Windows Platform development
  • Node.js development (Probably not required, given we installed Node.js separately)
• Under individual components, you'll need to install the following:
  • Git for Windows
  • .NET Core runtime
  • .NET 4.7.1 Targeting Pack
  • Windows SDK 16299 for UWP: C#, VB, JS

The First Build

• Before opening the solution, open a Powershell terminal, go into the FluentTerminal.Client folder and run:
  • npm install (Ignore the warnings related to fluent-terminal-client)
  • npm run build
• When the solution is first opened, it will help to set the architecture to x64 for testing, as we didn't install the ARM cross-compiling stuff for VS2017 and we only include pre-compiled winpty binaries for x86 and x64.
  • For this reason, the default architecture of "Any CPU" will fail to build, and you will have to choose either x64 or x86
• When first built, Visual studio will spend a significant amount of time resolving dependencies, and fetching additional components via nuGet. This is normal.
  • If you have done the steps so far correctly, and the build is left as a debug build, then the solution should build and launch when you press F5.

Subsequent Builds

• If you change the FluentTerminal.Client contents (OR if you merge or pull changes that resulted in changes to files in that folder),you'll need to re-run the npm run build (and npm install if you, or the pulled-in changes, change the dependencies).
• The rest of the build process is as usual through Visual Studio.

Packaging

• To start, copy the Package.StoreAssociation.xml.dev to Package.StoreAssociation.xml, this will provide a basic StoreAssociation file to use when building the app.
• With the solution open in Visual Studio, you can build a package for your own use by right-clicking on the FluentTerminal.App project in the Solution Explorer and choosing Store->Create App Packages
• Follow the prompts to create a package for sideloading, and if this is only for your personal use, it is OK to only build the x64 package, and not include the debug (i.e PDB) symbols.
  • Note that your commits with these settings (as well as a newly generated temporary store key) will involve changes to the FluentTerminal.App.csproj file, so be careful about that if you plan to submit them for PRs.
• This will produce, if successful, a folder in FluentTerminal.App\AppPackages that you can zip up and share. You'll need to follow the same install instructions as when installing a release from the GitHub repo, including installing the certificate and then installing the appxpackage.