At Build 2019, Microsoft announced an open source terminal for Windows. On 21 June 2019, it became available for preview in the Microsoft Store. I have been playing with it since and while its features are laudable, every developer knows the most important aspect of a terminal is its color scheme.
Luckily, it’s easy to write your own. From the Windows Terminal, select the dropdown at the right edge of the tabs. Select Settings
. Alternatively, the default keybinding for accessing settings is Ctrl
+,
.
This will open up a JSON file with the settings for your Terminal in the default editor.
Navigate to the “schemes” key. Here a list of JSON objects map standard Unix terminal colors (except for magenta
which is called purple
) to HEX codes. Copy an existing scheme and paste it into this list. Now, you can edit the colors as you like. I chose to implement a color scheme from flatuicolors.com called V1. You can find the implementation in a Gist here.
Give your scheme a unique “name” value and set the “profiles” to use that scheme.
As you edit the scheme, the Terminal will update in real time. To check your scheme, I have found the following bash
command useful:
for x in {0..8}; do for i in {30..37}; do for a in {40..47}; do echo -ne "e[$x;$i;$a""me[$x;$i;$a""me[0;37;40m "; done; echo; done; done; echo ""
This will display every text color on every highlight color. I used it to create this sample for the Gist:
Happy hacking!