Windows Terminal Gets Support For Creating Custom Themes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft released a new Windows Terminal version today that adds a long-awaited feature, making it possible to create and use custom themes. For now, users can only create themes by editing the Windows Terminal global JSON settings file to alter the background color of tabs and tab rows and choose between light and dark terminal window themes. After adding a new theme config to the JSON file, it will automatically appear in the app's Settings > Appearance settings page.

"themes is a global property that can contain a variety of themes objects, which will appear in the Theme dropdown on the Appearance page of the settings UI," Windows Terminal Program Manager Kayla Cinnamon explained. "Themes are only editable using the JSON file, but they will appear in the Theme dropdown in the settings UI." To add your own custom themes, you will have to install the app's latest version, Windows Terminal Preview 1.16. The new version also adds updated default colors and sets the dark theme as the default theme instead of following the default Windows system theme. "We have modified some of the default colors in Windows Terminal for a more cohesive appearance. Additionally, we are defaulting Terminal to use dark theme, rather than following the system theme," Cinnamon added.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

They did this but not some other thing? M$ sucks!11111

They mainly "suck" because this is a joke. The people that actually know what the fuck a terminal window is and what it's used for, are not clamoring for bubble-gum fonts and neon colors.

A more "cohesive" appearance? News flash. Scripts really don't give a shit if the font shoes don't match the window tie.

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[Junta]

To be fair, they've made huge strides compared to their classic console host in ways that matter. It actually *usually* does a decent job of handling VT emulation... usually... They still have odd behaviors now and then.

I broadly don't use it except to check in on it now and then, because the terminal emulation still has flaws, it's strangely slow to start, and perhaps most importantly I'm usually using a Linux desktop where it isn't applicable at all, as I prefer KDE to Microsoft desktop shell. When I do

Re:

[geekmux]

To be fair, they've made huge strides compared to their classic console host in ways that matter. It actually *usually* does a decent job of handling VT emulation... usually... They still have odd behaviors now and then. I broadly don't use it except to check in on it now and then, because the terminal emulation still has flaws...

So the priority in the bug queue, was font and theme features?

Microsoft should really consider selling that pig lipstick with the amount of shades they sling.

Re:

[SodaStream]

It's useful if you're managing multiple environments, because you can quickly differentiate which one it is from a distance without typing commands or reading any text.

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[ls671]

kde konsole put the remote server name right in the tab title now that's useful. Does windows terminal support tabs yet?

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[Darinbob]

Um, yes. Have you seen it yet? It's light years beyond the old command terminal. It's equivalent to the MacOS terminal. You can control what text is in the tab using escape sequences so the ancient .profile that worked in xterm will do the same thing in this terminal as well. You can have different color schemes in different tabs too, so you don't confuse your linux tab from the powershell tab, etc.

Really, the team that has done this has done a good job, including the team doing WSL, which makes me won

Re:

[SodaStream]

It has since forever. And it's great: I can hotkey into Bash in WSL, and I can split terminals, so for example I can have a PowerShell session querying hardware states in a while loop while checking connectivity in another session. I can have an interactive Bash console on one side and, say, and SQL console on the other side, enabling me to troubleshoot and test really quickly!

There are other, more useful features.

[twocows]

There are other, more useful features in Windows Terminal that elevate its usefulness. For one, having tabbed support is huge, and it also supports different kinds of terminals, so you can have a command prompt tab, a Powershell tab, etc. I agree that a lot of the stuff they add like emoji support is a bunch of silly shit, but it's also not worth complaining about so long as they are also adding shit I do care about it. If there were glaring functionality holes of roughly the same level of complexity that were being ignored in favor of emoji support, I'd call shenanigans, but I don't feel like that's the case. Then again, important context, I don't use Windows Terminal more than a couple times a week.

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[gTsiros]

wt is a disaster of unspeakable proportions. First time I used it, I hit an embarassingly bad bug in *two mouseclicks*. First click works, second doesn't. How they even managed that is beyond me.

it scares me how many people, seemingly knowledgeable, consider it (as) anything more than a bad joke

rainmeter has seen more serious development

Seems fine

[PPH]

Better if a theme can be selected on a command line. Or set in the shortcut launching each terminal. You get a half dozen terminals open on a desktop and now you can tell them apart.

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[Junta]

I don't avail myself of microsoft terminal much, but each 'profile' can have a different shortcut and each profile can have a different color scheme. I don't know how this fits or doesn't fit with the 'themes' compared to the 'profiles' and existing appearance settings, but it seems like it could have profile-centric color scheme changes to acheive the general idea you mentioned.

HAHAHAHA!!!!!

[unimind]

Sweet! Finally a useful feature! Maybe they'll get around to adding persistent command line history sometime soon, too!

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[MightyMartian]

Yes, I can just imagine .powershellrc, in XML format, that grows to 200mb after a couple of hours working in the terminal, because it encodes everything in UTF-32 in text-to-binary-to-text format, so when you hit the up arrow, it takes 3 seconds on a 12 core machine with SSD just to bring up the previous command.

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[Petersko]

I'll bet you 25 cents (USD) this scenario never materializes. Meet back here in 3 years, and grade it pass/fail.

Favorite Cool Terminal Programs. Cool Retro Term!

[MIPSPro]

My newest favorite is Cool Retro Term [itsfoss.com] which looks like a phosphor CRT of various stripes. Also, if you haven't seen YaQuake Terminal [kde.org] check that one out, too! If you liked BBS systems and want a terminal that can properly handle ANSI color sequences, check out MysticTerm [mysticbbs.com] and Qodem [sourceforge.net] (a clone of Qmodem with ssh and telnet support!). There is also Konsole [kde.org] and Eterm [enlightenment.org] which are both full of nice graphics features and cool terminal tricks. If you are a Windows User try MobaXterm [mobatek.net] and SecureCRT [vandyke.com] if you want to look for

Gasp!

[Viol8]

So advanced. I mean xterm has only been able to do this since at least the early 90s.

But then MS is often the last to arrive at the party yet still tries to pretend its their gig.

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[GoTeam]

They were busy over the last couple decades trying to figure out how to add tabs. I'm kind of shocked they haven't merged the terminal and minecraft yet.

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[Petersko]

In what way are they pretending it's their gig? They're paying attention to the need, but I don't think they think they're breaking new ground.

Meanwhile...

[slack_justyb]

Meanwhile GNOME Console [gnome.org] is a stripped down version of a regular terminal with even fewer options and configurations. And the reason we get this new console with less features is because Gtk4 breaks things that there was no obvious reason to break outside, meh works better for "our vision". None of the devs who wrote gnome-terminal want to sit there and YET AGAIN write the terminal over to YET ANOTHER major version of GTK. And for some features in gnome-terminal, the for shit way GTK4 works, you just simply CANNOT do some gnome-terminal features in GTK4. Because GTK devs feel that less is more for some stupid Apple loving reason.

[rant]And this is just more of the same with GTK devs. Break things with zero consideration for those who actually use the toolkit. And when asked why are you doing these things to the people who just want to make software with your stuff. . . "Why are you being so hateful?" is all anyone hears. Writing a program isn't a "do it over the weekend" kind of thing. If you are going to break major APIs at least provide a really good excuse for why you are doing that to the people who have written software with your shit.

GTK is such a shit toolkit at this point and there's zero incentive to write something today with it because, give it another five six years, it'll be time to do yet another major version change and break everyone shit all over again.

At least with Qt, you get LTS and when they do change the API, the whole change over from one to another make actual sense. GTK API changes are just whatever fucking whim hit someone that day and they YOLO that shit into their personal git, pushed to master, and called it a fucking weekend, let the plebs figure it out. I would say the GTK devs are a clusterfuck of developers but that would be assuming that they have some notion of leadership. No, it's just whatever floats your boat because you are one of the few anointed ones who have write access to the main repo. I mean fuck GTK 2 was pretty good and I was accepting of GTK 3 changes, but GTK 4 is just more of the same shove it down your throats because "we know better" bullshit and it's just old, it's old this "our way or the highway" ship that comes out of the GTK devs and more formally the RedHat devs. You know what I'll take the fucking highway at this point, because the highway is at least a bit more reasonable and what it does give me is predictable.

And fuck don't even get me started on GNOME. I'll say, there's zero people who work with GNOME who dislike GNOME, because if you're on the fence currently about GNOME, give it a few weeks and the devs will sure as shit give you a reason to get off the fence. There's no between, it's either you love it for the forward looking vision it is until you get mad at it/devs OR you see it for the slowly derailing on fire freight train it truly is.[/rant]

A Simple Use Case

[Petersko]

I know that in the new world of scripting and change management there are (or should be) barriers to prevent issues relating to environmental mistakes - i.e. sending commands to a production terminal that were meant for a sandbox - but back in the day our teams used custom themes to make it glaring obvious when your terminal was connected to prod.

Still didn't prevent one dba from dropping a critical database entirely in the middle of the work day, trying to cover it up for 20 minutes, and ensuring catastrophe... we had a 15 minute delay on the journaling to site 2 and could have recovered entirely if they'd have immediately owned up to the mistake...

Re: A Simple Use Case

[flyingfsck]

Terminal themes are sometimes useful. I used to use different backgrounds when logged into multiple servers over SSH, to help avoid running the right command on the wrong machine. It also helps against terminal boredom.

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[ls671]

kde konsole can do that, many profiles and you can switch the background colour for specific tabs in the same window

Hmm. FVWM had that in 1993

[gweihir]

And my current FVWM2 theme is still basically the same I made back then. So MS is about 30 years late?

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[Darinbob]

Yes they are. But they are rapidly catching up. Possibly the teams doing the Terminal and WSL are doing this under the radar, maybe it has full blessing from the Windows management. However they definitely have realized that a good command line environment is very important, whether it's for powershell power users, linux power users, remote login power users, or others. And they've realized that linux is vital as well, they can't continue with the Windows Server mentality when everyone out there uses VMs

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[gweihir]

So that would mean the Linux "cancer" has now infected the Windows environment. Makes sense to me. Pretty hilarious when you think back in the anti-Linux propaganda Ads MS used to do...

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[Darinbob]

Yup, but money changes minds. If MS wants to be in the Cloud selling business then it has to be very good friends with Linux.

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[gweihir]

Indeed.

And you still cannot set startup position

[Retired ICS]

Even the regular command prompt let you specify the opening size and position.

This hunk of crap cannot even do that.

ConsoleZ does much more

[tralfaz2001]

Its been around for years, is open source, and works great. First Windows download after cygwin. https://github.com/cbucher/con... [github.com]

Dark defaults are coming...

[Vlijmen Fileer]

This MS program manager Kayla Cinnamon advertises herself a.o. as having background in user experience design.

New version defaults to NOT following the system theme, but defaulting to dark theme.

What a massive UX gaffe that is. People on the dark UI fad/bandwagon/hype/hysteria truly seem to lose all sense of reality. It really is like a cult.