If you don't know what Hyper is, it is a beautiful, cross-platform terminal app for Windows, Mac OS and Linux built by the nice folks over at zeit.co using electron and React. I naturally have an aversion to apps built with electron because as a general rule, they consume more system resources than a native application would but I could not pass this up and a look at my terminal would give you an inkling I couldn't.

Installation

To install Hyper, follow the steps laid down below:

1. head to the project website at https://hyper.is/ and click on the "Download for Windows" button. This downloads an *.exe installer file to your Downloads folder or wherever you save downloaded files to.

2. Navigate to the folder using Explorer and double click on the installer. The installer copies the necessary files to the necessary places and notifies you once that is done.

3. Search for Hyper in the start menu or double click the shortcut on your Desktop and you should see a terminal interface similar to the one shown below.

Git Bash

If you are like me, you would not install Hyper to use CMD so it is time to pimp the terminal up and make bash our default shell for Hyper. My assumption is that you have Git for Windows installed. if you don't, follow this guide. With that done, follow the steps:

1. You need to have the hyper binary added to your PATH. Click the top left hamburger menu (☰) => Plugins => Install Hyper CLI command in PATH.

2. Close and reopen your terminal (this may be necessary to refresh the shell)

3. Run the command hyper i hyper-afterglow to install the hyper-afterglow theme and give your terminal beautiful colours.

4. Click the top left hamburger menu (☰) => Edit => Preferences or Ctrl + ,. A file .hyper.js would be opened in Notepad

5. Change the shell key in the config to the following:

   config: {
   ...
   shell: 'C:\\Program Files\\Git\\git-cmd.exe',
   ...
   }
   

6. Change the shellArgs key in the config to the following:

   config: {
   ...
   shellArgs: ['--command=usr/bin/bash.exe', '-l', '-i'],
   ...
   }
   

7. Change the env key in the config to the following:

   config: {
   ...
   env: {TERM: 'cygwin'},
   ...
   }
   

8. Save the file and close Notepad.

9. Close and reopen Hyper and see a terminal you'd actually like using.

This is an open-source project and if you want to contribute by fixing bugs, implementing features or just filing issues, you can do that at https://github.com/zeit/hyper

Cheers