How to Customize the New Windows Terminal App

Windows Terminal with an background showing an ocean wave

With the new Windows Terminal app, Windows now finally has a tabbed terminal that can run Cmd, PowerShell, and Bash prompts in the same window. It’s deeply customizable, too—you can even set animated GIFs as the background.

Beyond the background, you can change the terminal’s theme, too. Whether it’s the colors of the text or backgrounds or the font style, you can make Windows Terminal your own. Microsoft even included several pre-set themes. All you need is a text editor and some basic familiarity with JSON. If you aren’t familiar with JSON, you can probably still make changes; we’ll walk you through it.

How to Customize the Windows Terminal

Windows terminal json configuration file, showing a custom background option.

The first step to customizing Windows Terminal is to ensure Windows has default app associated with the JSON file type. The best way to do that is from File Explorer.

Launch File Explorer and find a JSON file. If you don’t have one, create one. Right-click on File Explorer and “New” then click on “Text document.”

Rename the file to test.json (deleting the .txt extension in the process), and confirm you want to change the extension. If you don’t see the .txt file extension, tell File Explorer to show file extensions.

File explorer submenu with arrows pointing to New and Text Document

Next, right-click on the new JSON file and choose the “Open With” option. Choose your preferred text editor, whether that be Notepad++ or Notepad.

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