Setting Up Warp Terminal and PowerShell on a Windows Work Laptop

Git Bash on Windows is notoriously slow because it translates bash commands to Win32 calls at runtime, making every keystroke feel heavier than it should. This article shows how to replace it on a corporate machine — without admin rights — by pairing a portable PowerShell installation with Warp Terminal, plus how to fix the execution policy that blocks the startup script on first launch.

•~2 min read
#PowerShell#Warp#Windows#DevTools

I’ve been using Git Bash on my work laptop for a while, and it’s painfully slow. Apparently the reason is that Git Bash has to translate bash commands into something Windows understands at runtime, which adds noticeable latency to everything. A colleague pointed this out and it immediately made sense. I wanted something better, but on a corporate machine you usually can’t just install things freely.

Then I found out Warp Terminal now has a working Windows build. I had tried it before and it wouldn’t run properly, but the current version works well. I paired it with a portable version of PowerShell (no installer needed), and the combination is genuinely good. It’s not zsh or fish, but it’s a huge step up from Git Bash on Windows.

Here’s how to set it up.

Install Portable PowerShell

The portable version of PowerShell lets you run pwsh without installing anything system-wide — useful on a corporate machine where you might not have admin rights.

  1. Go to the PowerShell releases page and download the ZIP for the latest stable release. Look for a file named something like PowerShell-7.x.x-win-x64.zip.

  2. Extract the ZIP into a folder of your choice. A path like C:\Users\<YOUR_USERNAME>\tools\pwsh works well.

  3. Open the Start menu and search for “Edit the environment variables for your account”.

  4. Under User variables, select Path and click Edit.

  5. Click New and paste the path to the folder where pwsh.exe lives (e.g. C:\Users\<YOUR_USERNAME>\tools\pwsh).

  6. Click OK to save. Open a new terminal and verify with:

Terminal window
pwsh --version

Install Warp Terminal

Warp is available via scoop, which is the easiest route on Windows:

Terminal window
scoop install warp-terminal

Alternatively, grab the installer directly from warp.dev.

Fix the PowerShell Execution Policy

When you first open a PowerShell session inside Warp, you might not see a prompt immediately. After a few seconds, a notice will appear in the top-right corner saying something like “See the startup script” — click it.

You’ll see that the startup script is being blocked by an execution policy restriction. Double-click on the blocked item and press Enter to dismiss it for now so you can type in the terminal.

To fix it properly, run the following and enter A (Yes to All) when prompted:

Terminal window
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

You can verify the current state of all policies with:

Terminal window
Get-ExecutionPolicy -List

Once that’s set, new Warp sessions will load your PowerShell profile cleanly without any blocked script warnings.

Done

That’s it. Warp handles the terminal UI nicely (block-based input, decent history search, AI features if you want them) and pwsh runs natively on Windows without the translation overhead that makes Git Bash feel sluggish. Not my first choice compared to zsh or fish, but for a Windows work machine it’s a comfortable setup.