How to customize Windows Terminal application

With the new Windows Terminal application, Windows finally has a tabbed terminal that can run Command Prompt, Powershell and Bash in the same window. And it's highly customizable, you can even set animated GIFs as wallpapers.

In addition, you can also change the terminal theme, text color or background, font style to make Windows Terminal your own style. Microsoft even offers some pre-installed themes. All you need is a text editor and some basic knowledge about JSON.

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How to customize Windows Terminal

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The first step to customizing Windows Terminal is to make sure Windows has the default application associated with the JSON file type. The best way to do that is from File Explorer.

Launch File Explorer and find the JSON file. If not, create a JSON file by right-clicking on File Explorer> New , then clicking on the Text document.

Change the file name to test.json (delete the .txt file extension) and specify the tail change. If you don't see the .txt file extension, turn on the display of the file extension in File Explorer.

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Next, right-click on the JSON file and select the Open With option. Select your favorite text editor, you can use Notepad ++ or Notepad.

Open Windows Terminal and click the down arrow in the title bar (right to the plus icon), then select Settings .

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JSON file will launch in the editor. You can actually make all the changes here.

How to change the background

You can change the background with any kind of image file like PNG, JPGE or even animated GIF.

To change the wallpaper of any shell, you need to place the image file where the Terminal application can read. Windows Terminal is the Univeral Windows Platform (UWP) application, so it likes to use its AppData directory. AppData is the directory you usually see in the User Profile and is used to store program settings. UWP application creates a custom AppData folder and uses it.

The Windows Terminal AppData folder is located in:

 %LOCALAPPDATA%PackagesMicrosoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbweRoamingState 

Just copy it to the File Explorer path bar and press Enter , you will be taken to the correct location. Place your image files here and Windows Terminal can use them as wallpapers.

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Open Settings in Windows Terminal and scroll down to the profile you want to change. There are several profiles in the "profiles" section :. Each profile corresponds to an option in the Cmd, PowerShell, Linux distribution, etc. You can see which option is by checking the "commandline" or "name" line in each section.

To change the background image of one of these sections, in the icon line, add the following line:

 "backgroundImage" : "ms-appdata:///roaming/yourimage.jpg", "backgroundImageOpacity" : 0.75, "backgroundImageStrechMode" : "fill", 

yourimage.jpg is the name of your image or gif file. You need to make sure each line in the sections, except the last line ends with a comma.

If using a GIF file, you should change the fill to uniformToFill. If you fill it, you will see a black box around the GIF image.

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How to change the default key link

If you don't like a specific keyboard shortcut, you can change it here. For example, if you want Ctrl + e to close the tab, you need to find the following:

 { "command" : "closeTab", "keys" : [ "ctrl+w" ] }, 

Change 'ctrl + w' to 'ctrl + e' (leave the quotation marks intact) and then save the file. If you want to align everything to what is available, make sure the file uses whitespace instead of tabs. As shown above, the file uses Unix Line Endings, but most text editors (even Notepad) can handle Unix Line Endings without problems.

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Change the default palette

Windows Terminal has several color palettes used to change font colors, background colors, cursor shapes, etc. You can choose a specific theme for Command Prompt, Bash and PowerShell.

To change the default theme, you first need to find the shell profile you want to change by scrolling down to the "profiles" section: and finding the command line in each section.

For example, you will see "commandline": "cmd.exe" in Command Prompt, then change "colorScheme": "Campbell" to the color you want to use. You can choose from Campbell, One Half Dark, One Half Light, Solarized Dark and Solarized Light. For example, if you want to use Solarized Light, you need to change the color palette to "colorScheme": "Solarized Light . These colors resemble the color palette used in Microsoft's colortool utility.

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Windows Terminal is quite interesting and it gives you a small taste of Microsoft's previous Windows Sets.

I wish you all success!