The New Windows Terminal Is Out Now. Here’s How You Can Customize It.

The new windows terminal is out now. And I am in love with it after using it. Initially, when I install, it takes some time to customize it and make it look more beautiful. So I thought to publish an article so it won’t be time-consuming for others.

If you want to know what are the features of the new windows terminal go through their official blog.

Windows Terminal 1.0 | Windows Command Line

To demonstrate the customization process I am going to customize the following settings

1. Color Schemes
2. Font
3. Background Image
4. Acrylic Background

In starting when you install your terminal it looks like this

After customization, your terminal will be going to look like this

Basic Concepts

In the windows terminal, we have many different profiles like

1. PowerShell
2. CMD
3. WSL

So you can customize them all at once or you can particularly customize different profiles differently.

Opening Settings

To open setting simply type CTRL + , or open through the setting option.

This will be going to open an editor or IDE. For me, it opens Visual Studio. It opens a settings.json file.

Customizing Settings

We can customize settings either for particular profiles separately or for every profile at once.

To customize setting —

For A Particular Profile

To customize the settings for a particular profile open the settings and see the line which seems like this.

"list": [
   {
   ............some text
   },
   {
   ............some text
   }
]

The “list” contains every profile. You can see the profile name specified by name on the list.

{
  "name" : "..."
}

For All Profiles

To customize the settings for all profiles at once see for the key in the file. The profiles key contains the value that has a key defaults . defaults contains all the properties that are common to all profiles.

"profiles": {
   "defaults": {
          "colorScheme": "One Half Dark"
}
}

Color Scheme Customization

In the windows terminal, there are many color schemes to choose from and it also gives you the freedom to define your custom color scheme.

To customize the color scheme for a particular profile open the settings and go to the profile for which you wish to change the color scheme.

To change the theme add the colorScheme key and value in the profile.

{
 "colorScheme": "..."
}

For example —

This code applies the One Half Dark color scheme

{
  "colorScheme": "One Half Dark"
}

After applying the theme you can see your terminal look like this.

To change the color scheme for all profiles add thecolorScheme key and value in the defaults .

"profiles": {
   "defaults": {
          "colorScheme": "One Half Dark"
    }
}

This will apply the One Half Dark color scheme to all the profiles.

To know more about the themes in the windows terminal go through this link

Windows Terminal Color Schemes

Font Customization

Before customizing the font, make sure that the font you wish to apply is installed on your system.

To customize the type of font windows terminal uses fontFace property and to customize the size of the font windows terminal uses the fontSize property.

To customize the font for a particular profile, navigate to it, and add the properties.

{
  "colorScheme": "One Half Dark",
  "fontFace": "Victor Mono",
  "fontSize": 10
}

You can use the same settings in the property to apply the font customization for all profiles.

I have used the ‘Victor Mono’ font. And after adding these settings your terminal will look like this —

Acrylic Background

To make the terminal window look more beautiful. I am going to add the Acrylic background.

To perform this we have to use the useAcrylic property and set it to true .

{
  "colorScheme": "One Half Dark",
  "fontFace": "Victor Mono",
  "fontSize": 10,
  "useAcrylic": true
}

This will how the terminal looks after the following customization —

Background Image

It is one of the most awesome features to add the background image in the windows terminal.

To do so just add the backgroundImage property to the profile.

{
  "colorScheme": "One Half Dark",
  "fontFace": "Victor Mono",
  "fontSize": 10,
  "useAcrylic": true,
  "backgroundImage": "PATH-TO-THE-IMAGE",
  "backgroundImageStretchMode": "none",
  "backgroundImageAlignment": "center",
  "backgroundImageOpacity": 0.5
}

There are some more settings that you can change to customize the backgroundImage like

1. backgroundImageStretchMode
2. backgroundImageAlignment
3. backgroundImageOpacity

My Customizations

More

To know more about customizing the windows terminal go through their official documentation.

Windows Terminal Global Settings