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Read moreInstalling and Customizing the Windows 10 Terminal
I’ve fallen in love with Windows PowerShell. As a younger admin I was was terrified of making mistakes using batch scripts and Microsoft command prompt. Years later I was hired to write PowerShell for an high-availability feature of a security product and loved it ever since! Needless to say when the Windows 10 Terminal was announced last year I was ecstatic.
So let’s get to it and customize our Windows terminal!
A couple of things to note about the Terminal before we start:
Windows terminal can either be run as a normal user or as an admin - not both in the same window.
As of 1709, Windows PowerShell and Terminal include OpenSSH so you can ssh natively from Windows!
Sorry Putty you did us good over the years…
Install the Terminal
When the Windows Terminal was first released you had to clone the GitHub repo and compile the code yourself - sheesh! Now it’s available if you have Win 10 190X via the Windows Store!
Head over to the Windows Store and search for “terminal”. Click Install and click the X when asked to sign into Microsoft, unless you want to for some reason. When it’s installed, click Launch.
Settings File
Microsoft finally took a queue from the open source community and is moving many products to using .json for their app file settings. Similarly to the VS Code post all of the Windows Terminal settings are stored in a neat little .json file in:
C:\Users\<username>r\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState
Open the profiles.json file by clicking the downward facing arrow and click settings.
Default Settings file
The “profiles’ section is what holds the settings for each “tab” in Terminal.
We can see a section noted for Windows PowerShell, cmd and Azure Cloud Shell.
We will learn later down below how to add a profile or tab for Ubuntu and Kali Linux.
The “schemes” section is what holds the settings that you can reference to theme your tabs.
The “keybindings” section allows you to override the default Terminal keybindings.
Change The Theme
One of the benefits of using the terminal is that you can finally fully modify the theme! I personally really love the simplicity of this theme by Dracula: https://github.com/dracula/windows-terminal and will be using it in this post.
First, locate a theme you like (or build your own). Copy the scheme from the source and paste it into the “schemes” section of your profiles.json file and save.
Next, add “colorScheme”: <scheme name> to the section for the tab you want to modify, save the .json file and there you have a nicely themed terminal!
In another post we will add more tabs such as cmd and Azure!