How to Setup a Default Terminal for Windows Terminal

If you're anything like me, you've appreciated watching Microsoft get more involved in the Open Source community. One of those projects that Microsoft released is WSL(2). For the Windows OS, the terminals we use to interact with WSL were lacking prior to Windows Terminal. I now enjoy the development environment I'm able to set up on my Windows machine. 

This new terminal from Microsoft can run any Windows command-line app, even the above-mentioned WSL. Unfortunately, as you can tell from my tabs, the default terminal is Windows PowerShell... Since I mostly interact with WSL when I'm on Windows I figured I'd write a quick guide on how to set the default terminal to WSL.

Getting to the Settings

You can get to the settings via Ctrl+,. I've listed out the harder, GUI-focused way below.

1. Navigate to the drop-down menu to the right of your new tab icon.

2. Click on Settings

Modifying the Settings

3. Now we should see a .txt file opened in Notepad.

4. We will need to change the defaultProfile property. This is pointing to an identifier for powershell.exe. Locate the guid property that relates to your preferred WSL distribution. In my case, it is Ubuntu 20.04.

5. Save the settings.txt and open a new tab!