Most developers need to use a terminal at some point. If you are developing on Windows, you have two choices out-of-the-box: the good old Command Prompt (CMD) and Windows PowerShell. There are hardly any reasons to use CMD, though, as Microsoft is continuously improving PowerShell since it was first introduced in Windows 7. CMD on the other hand is noticeably inferior to PowerShell and shells available on UNIX and is considered pretty much a legacy tool. Since Windows 10, Microsoft has even made PowerShell the default terminal.

In this post, I want to show you how change your default terminal to use PowerShell (or any other third-party shell).

A common complaint I have about CMD is the limited navigation. If you are used to UNIX shells you are used to change directories in a single command which is more cumbersome in CMD. Luckily, some tools (e.g. IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA/WebStorm/PhpStorm/PyCharm) allow you to choose which terminal is used.

How to enable PowerShell as default terminal in IntelliJ

Open IntelliJ settings. Go to the “Tools” section. Press the “Terminal” option. Set the correct Shell path to the PowerShell EXE file. In the case of Windows 8.1, the path is: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe . You should use the latest PowerShell version available! Create a new terminal session in IntelliJ. Alternatively, you can just restart IntelliJ to apply the changes.

Similarly, you can also set your default terminal in the popular VSCode editor.

How to enable PowerShell as default terminal in VSCode

Open the “User Settings” (e.g. by opening the command palette). Add a new “terminal.integrated.shell.windows” setting and specify the path to PowerShell. Save to apply the changes.

PowerShell styling: how to change font size and more

On Windows 8.1, I initially had the problem that the PowerShell window font was way too small to read. I opened the settings and changed the font but it did not work as expected. Here’s how you can change the font size in PowerShell:

Open Windows PowerShell as administrator. Otherwise, changes might not be applied. Right-click on the title bar and click “Properties”. Switch to the “Font” tab, set your desired font size and confirm your changes.

The Windows Power User Menu which was introduced in Windows 8 contains many useful shortcuts like:

Open the task manager

Turn off your computer

Show the desktop

Open Command Prompt

Before Windows 10, you would see CMD instead of PowerShell. Here’s how you can change it to PowerShell.

How to enable PowerShell in Windows Power User Menu

Right-click on the Windows task bar. Click the “Properties” option. Go to the “Navigation” tab. Enable “ Replace Command Prompt with Windows PowerShell in the menu when I right-click the Start button or press Windows Key + X”. Press both Windows key + X to open the Power User Menu which should contain an option “Windows PowerShell”.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this article about how to enable and style Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is way better than CMD and is already included in modern Windows systems. Let me know in the comments about your experiences with Windows PowerShell.