The new Windows Terminal is great. It's a huge improvement over the previous command line and PowerShell terminals, and it has great native support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). But like all good shells, its power is in its customization. If you want to be a real power user (or maybe just impress your techy friends), you'll need these great tweaks.

1 Change your font and cursor

Customization basics

The terminal has some great new customization options built in. Some of these are configurable in the JSON settings file, but many are also available within the app itself. To access customization, follow these steps.

1. Open a new terminal window
2. Select the downward facing arrow at the top tab bar, the select Settings.
3. In the settings window, select the Default profile on the left hand side.
4. Select Appearance at the bottom of the profile window.

Here you can customize the fonts (we'll show you how to install custom fonts with Oh My Posh later in this article), as well as some basic color and cursor settings, including the shape. We'd recommend exploring this pane and familiarising yourself with some of the options available.

Terminal Customization is on a per-profile basis. Here, we're modifying the default profile. However, it's possible to set up different profiles for different use cases or different customization sets. Hit Add a new Profile in the left-hand window pane to open up the profile manager. This can also be useful for testing out some new customization without breaking your existing setup.

You'll find the JSON settings file in the bottom left. Change some settings in the UI and you'll see them reflected in this file.

2 Enable full transparency

It just looks cooler.

The Windows Terminal now supports full background transparency for a cleaner, sleeker interface, as well as making it easier to reference other material in the background when using the terminal.

1. To enable transparency in the terminal, open Settings from the top bar menu.
2. Select the Default profile on the left-hand side.
3. Select Appearance, then scroll down and locate Transparency.
4. Set the Transparency value to 65 (or your preferred value between 0-100)

Close the settings menu and you should now see your terminal as transparent. You can also do this in the JSON settings menu by adding the following line to the defaults profile block.

"opacity": 65,"useAcrylic": false

The opacity value is a percentage, and we'd recommend testing out some different options to see what suits you. You can also take this further by adding a background image in the same menu.

3 Install some prompt themes

Get serious about customization with Oh-My-Posh

While the new Windows Terminal does include custom themes and color schemes, it's a little limited and can be hard to use. That's where Oh My Posh comes in. It's a theming engine that works with any shell and makes it far easier to customize your terminal prompt.

There are several ways to install Oh My Posh (check out the installation page for alternatives), but the easiest way is with this manual one-liner. It requires no dependencies and installs quickly. We'd then recommend installing NerdFonts. While not required for all themes, a Nerd Font adds many of the text glyphs which make these themes look great. We'll be installing a common font named Hack. Follow these instructions to setup a prompt theme with Oh-My-Poly with the Hack Font.

1. Open a new Terminal window and run the following command to install Oh-My-Posh manually.

   Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; Invoke-Expression ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://ohmyposh.dev/install.ps1'))

2. Once installed, restart your terminal. You can check if Oh-My-Posh has been installed correctly by running

   oh-my-posh version

   You should see a version number.
3. Restart your terminal, and reopen an administrator terminal Window. You can do this by searching Terminal in the start menu and clicking Run as Administrator
4. Run the following Oh My Posh command to install the Nerd Hack Font.

   oh-my-posh font install Hack

5. Once installed, select the font under Settings > Defaults > Appearance > Font
6. Run the following command to download and install a theme. Here we're install Agnoster, but check out Oh My Posh's list of themes for some other options.

   oh-my-posh init pwsh --config 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh/main/themes/agnoster.omp.json' | Invoke-Expression

Note that all themes are just files either locally or online, and in this case we're downloading the theme from Github directly. Once installed, restart your terminal and enjoy your stylish new prompt.

4 Start using Quake Mode

A longstanding must for power users

Quake mode transforms your Windows Terminal experience. When using a quake mode terminal, the traditional window is gone. Instead, the terminal exists as a drop-down Window accessible by keyboard shortcut, snapped to the top half of your monitor. This makes it far easier (especially when working with a single monitor) to work from reference material like documentation, a guide or a codebase, and quickly access the terminal when you need it without tab-switching back and forth. You can read more about quake mode in Microsoft's docs, but we'd recommend you try it out yourself to get a feel for it.

Quake mode isn't a global toggle in Windows 11. Instead, you can open a terminal in Quake mode in several ways. You can start a new terminal session in quake mode by running the following command in an existing session:

wt -w _quake

Alternatively, you can start a new terminal with the Win + ` (grave accent) keyboard shortcut anywhere in Windows. You can customize your Quake mode shortcut by adding the following to the actions section of your Terminal's JSON settings file.

{ "command": { "action": "quakeMode" }, "keys": "ctrl+f12" }

Which should look like this:

5 Backup your settings

Don't lose your precious customization

One of the great features of the new Windows Terminal is that all its configuration is stored within a single settings.json file, similar to other Microsoft apps like Visual Studio Code. To back up your settings, follow these steps:

1. Open a new Terminal Window
2. In the top tab bar, select the downward-facing arrow followed by Settings
3. In the bottom left corner of the settings window, select Open JSON settings. This file will open in a text editor.
4. Save this file somewhere safe. We'd recommend either saving to Google Drive or another cloud storage system, or to a version control system like Git.

To restore your settings, reverse the process. Delete the contents of your fresh settings.json file and paste in your old ones, then save and restart the terminal.

Explore the power of terminal customization

There's plenty to play with in the new Windows Terminal, and it's a welcome upgrade on the old experience. Especially if you're going to spend a lot of time working in the Terminal, you'll want an experience that is sleek and efficient while not holding back your workflow.