How to customize Windows Terminal

Terminals are always been there for greater deeds. Almost every Developer or programmer uses it daily to perform some tasks. There have been many options for developers like GNOME, Hyper, etc, and Windows Terminal is one of them.

The new Windows Terminal is a modern, powerful, fast, and efficient terminal for users of command-based tools and shells like WSL, Cmd, and PowerShell. Windows terminal has some extended features which make it stand-out Like it has multiple tabs, UTF-8 character support, GPU accelerated text rendering engine, customization, and configurations. Besides these, it is open-source, which makes it really intriguing.

Every Developer at one stage has to modify the tools to get the most out of them. There come customization and configurations. Today we will learn to customize our terminal to make it look better and work efficiently by adding some shortcut keys.

Installation of Windows Terminal

If you have windows Terminal installed then you might skip this part, otherwise go to windows store and search for “Windows terminal” and install it.

How to do it?

You will see a button with the text “Get” on it in the right-top corner. Press it and you will then see the next button on the same place with the text “Download” on it. Press that button and after 1–5 mins, the Windows terminal will be downloaded onto your machine.

Change Default Profile in Windows Terminal

By default, when you will open your Windows terminal you will see PowerShell as the default Profile. So, I am going to change it to cmd. Let’s see how we can change it.

How to do it?

Open the windows terminal and go to settings by pressing ‘ctrl+,” and there in JSON file "defaultProfile": "{Some hex code}" change the hex code of this to the hex code of cmd guid which you will find inside list section.

Add custom color schemes in Windows Terminal

I am the kind of person who always gets excited by the theme. Why? Because it makes me feel better. When I see the screen which looks better to me, I preferably work longer on that screen without getting bored. This is why I always prefer an exciting theme.

There are many themes available for the windows terminal and one of them I love is “SeaShells”.

 "schemes": [
    {
      "name": "SeaShells",
      "black": "#17384c",
      "red": "#d15123",
      "green": "#027c9b",
      "yellow": "#fca02f",
      "blue": "#1e4950",
      "purple": "#68d4f1",
      "cyan": "#50a3b5",
      "white": "#deb88d",
      "brightBlack": "#434b53",
      "brightRed": "#d48678",
      "brightGreen": "#628d98",
      "brightYellow": "#fdd39f",
      "brightBlue": "#1bbcdd",
      "brightPurple": "#bbe3ee",
      "brightCyan": "#87acb4",
      "brightWhite": "#fee4ce",
      "background": "#09141b",
      "foreground": "#deb88d",
      "cursorColor": "#fca02f",
      "selectionBackground": "#1e4962"
    }
  ],

There are many other options also available which you can check here.

How to do it?

After installing the windows terminal, open it and got to settings by pressing “ctrl+,”. you will see a JSON file, there navigate to scheme array and inside the array paste the code of color scheme.

After adding the color scheme now navigate to the list and look for the cmd section. You will see some code like,

{
"guid": "{0caa0dad-35be-5f56-a8ff-afceeeaa6101}",
"name": "Command Prompt",
"commandline": "cmd.exe",
"hidden": false,
},

After finding this code add "colorScheme": "nameOfSceme" . In my case, I will add seaShells like "colorScheme": "seaShells" and here you go, you have changed the theme of the Windows Terminal.
There is the official documentation of Color schemes in Windows Terminal, which you can check out to understand better.

Bonus

If you want to add some transparency to your Windows terminal then you can add these styles below the colorScheme

"useAcrylic": true,
"acrylicOpacity": 0.75

Add some custom keybindings

When working with a Windows terminal, you will need some keybinding to perform your task faster like opening new windows and closing current windows or things like that.

How to do it?

Go to settings and look for actions array inside the JSON file and you may already see some keybindings there. Add your preferred keybindings there according to your choice like

{
"command": "closeTab",
"keys": "ctrl+w"
},
{
"command": "newTab",
"keys": "ctrl+n"
},

There are other keybindings that you can add to your lists like tab shifting and others according to your need. The basic syntax will be the same.

Official Documentation of Windows Terminal

There is always some documentation of tools available. Likewise, Windows Terminal has also the official documentation. If you want to know more about the Windows terminal feel free to read the documentation.

Reading the documentation will help you discover the tool more deeply and learn about the tool which will help you discover which tool will be the best fit for your problem. Understanding the tool can also help you discover some flaws which you can fix by contributing to that project and get counted as a contributor for that tool.

Conclusion

These were some of the changes, I made and shared with you guys. There are a lot of other changes and configurations you can do to make your workflow easy. I usually customize things as I need to do. Otherwise, I go with the default ones. You can test and do some stuff, probably you will make something better, which will suit you.