New Windows Terminal Preview Boasts Themes and Colors Galore

A new preview version of Windows Terminal will make your code more personalized. Version 1.16 has a new theme property to customize your developer tools.

The themes global property is the most significant change. Themes can only be made by editing JSON, though they will end up in the settings UI under "Theme" afterward. Here's some sample JSON that Windows Terminal Program Manager Kayla Cinnamon provided in a blog post announcing the feature: 

"themes": 
[
    {
        "name": "Grace Kelly",
        "tab": 
        {
            "background": "#00515EFF",
            "showCloseButton": "always",
            "unfocusedBackground": null
        },
        "tabRow": 
        {
            "background": "#061612FF",
            "unfocusedBackground": "#061612FF"
        },
        "window": 
        {
            "applicationTheme": "dark"
        }
    }
]

There are new tab, tabRow, and window objects. Microsoft has documentation on how to set up themes here. 

Outside of themes, there are new default colors in Terminal. It will also default to using dark mode rather than your system theme.

A few other customization options are floating around, including the newTabPosition setting (also on the appearance page if you prefer to point and click in settings) to decide whether new tabs will open next to your currently selected tab or at the end of your open tabs. The color selection tool in the settings UI is also getting a refresh with better styling and the ability to set any theme as your new default.

Lastly, there are some bug fixes detailed in the blog post. Developers can install the latest from Terminal or Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store, GitHub, or with winget.

Microsoft has been focusing on making the Command Line a bit prettier since Windows Terminal was announced at Build in 2019. The new updates have been arriving at a clip (Version 1.15 is receiving its updates today) since.

Default Rendering Engine and Other Changes

Microsoft is taking the experimental rendering engine released in version 1.13 of Terminal and making it the new default. Cinnamon writes that it is "more performant and now supports additional pixel shaders (including the retro effect), bold text, and underline/overline/hyperlink lines." However, it requires GPU hardware support, so if your machine (or a virtual machine that you remote into) doesn't have a graphics card, the Terminal will turn to a different renderer that doesn't need the GPU.

There is a new action called expandSelectionToWord, which takes a text selection and surrounds the words the selection is already part of.