Windows Terminal - Run as Administrator by default

Author: Joe
Date: 07/15/2019 07:45:00

I was excited to try out the new Windows Terminal preview build in the Microsoft Store, since I had downloaded/compiled earlier builds and fell in love with it!

Unfortunately, since the app is distributed in a UWP package, Microsoft decided that shortcuts to UWP apps can't be made to run as an administrator.  For developers such as myself that pretty much live in an administrative PowerShell prompt, having to right click the icon every time to run as an administrator is a huge time suck.  So, I searched for a workaround:

  1. Right click on your desktop, and click New -> Shortcut
  2. For the location, type in the following and click next:
      C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe /c start /b wt
  3. For the name, type in "Windows Terminal", and click Next.
  4. Now, right click on the new shortcut, and click Properties.
  5. On the Shortcut tab, click Advanced, and click "Run as Administrator"

You'll now have a shortcut you can drag onto your task bar that'll launch Windows Terminal as an admin!

Also, if you want to change the shortcut icon to the one provided by Windows Terminal, it can be downloaded from the GitHub repo:
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/res/terminal.ico