Windows 11 24H2 Power User Guide: PowerShell 7 and Windows Terminal Tricks

Windows 11 24H2 quietly shipped a lot of quality-of-life improvements for power users, and pairing them with PowerShell 7 and a well-configured Windows Terminal turns Windows into a genuinely productive shell environment. Here’s how to set it up properly.

Install PowerShell 7 Alongside Windows PowerShell

Windows still ships PowerShell 5.1 by default, but PowerShell 7 (built on .NET) is faster, cross-platform, and gets active feature updates. Install it via winget rather than downloading an installer manually:

winget install --id Microsoft.PowerShell --source winget

# Verify the version and confirm it's the pwsh.exe binary
pwsh -Version
Get-Command pwsh | Select-Object Source

Configure Windows Terminal as Your Default

Set Windows Terminal as the default terminal app (Settings > Privacy & Security > For developers, or directly in Terminal’s settings), then customize settings.json for a faster workflow:

{
    "defaultProfile": "{574e775e-4f2a-5b96-ac1e-a2962a402336}",
    "profiles": {
        "defaults": {
            "font": { "face": "Cascadia Code NF", "size": 11 },
            "opacity": 90,
            "useAcrylic": true
        },
        "list": [
            {
                "name": "PowerShell 7",
                "commandline": "pwsh.exe -NoLogo",
                "icon": "ms-appx:///ProfileIcons/pwsh.png",
                "startingDirectory": "%USERPROFILE%"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Essential PowerShell 7 Profile Tweaks

Edit your $PROFILE to add aliases, a better prompt, and useful functions. PSReadLine gives you fish-style autosuggestions out of the box:

Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionSource History
Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionViewStyle ListView
Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete

function ll { Get-ChildItem -Force @args }
function grep { Select-String @args }
function which($name) { Get-Command $name | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Source }

Import-Module posh-git -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
oh-my-posh init pwsh --config "$env:POSH_THEMES_PATH/atomic.omp.json" | Invoke-Expression

Useful 24H2-Specific Features

• Sudo for Windows — a native sudo command finally lets you elevate a single command instead of relaunching an entire terminal as admin. Enable it under Settings > System > For developers > Enable sudo.
• Improved File Explorer search — Explorer’s search indexing is noticeably faster; combine it with fzf for near-instant file lookups from the terminal.
• WinGet configuration files (winget configure) — declarative environment setup, similar in spirit to a Dockerfile for your desktop.

Try Sudo on Windows

# Once enabled in Settings, this elevates just the one command
sudo Get-Service | Where-Object Status -eq 'Stopped'
sudo Restart-Service -Name Spooler

Wrapping Up

The combination of PowerShell 7, Windows Terminal, and the new sudo command turns Windows 11 into a shell that finally feels comparable to a Linux desktop for day-to-day development work — without giving up native Windows tooling.