Terminal, is the user and operating system interaction of the most primitive input and output environment, but also to perform some advanced system operations necessary tools. And Windows terminal “small black box”, has been giving everyone a kind of “ugly difficult to use” impression. Next, I’ll show you some ways to tweak the Windows terminal environment to make it feel as good as macOS and Linux terminals.

▍ Console, Terminal, and Shell

Hold on, hold on. Since we’re going to be revamping the Windows terminal environment from the perspective of “terminals” and “command line interpreters” respectively, before we start revamping Windows terminals, let me talk about some specific terms: Console, Terminal, and command line interpreter.

For now:

  • When we open a Windows Command Prompt, we actually open a Terminal.

  • A command line interpreter (Shell) is an interactive program that “enters commands and gets results” in a terminal.

That’s why the latest Shell for Windows is called PowerShell. (Console The Console is a relatively old concept, a separate terminal in the physical sense of the mainframe, which we won’t discuss here.) Bash and ZSH are also shells for those of you who use macOS and Linux.

For example, a Terminal is like a person’s clothes, which can have a variety of colors, shapes and even functions. The Shell is the person you communicate with to get information, and he can give you a lot of information in advance, reminders, and even automatically help you with what you want to say.

Terminal and Shell differences and connections

As I mentioned earlier, PowerShell is the next generation Shell for Windows. The “Little black box Command Prompt” that you may be more familiar with is an old Windows forward compatible work with many bugs and many inconveniences. So let’s go ahead and use PowerShell!

Next, let’s start with the external “default terminal” of Windows PowerShell.

▍ The default PowerShell terminal

Windows provides us with a default PowerShell terminal that can be opened by right-clicking “Windows PowerShell” on the Windows Start menu. Although the default terminal has many limitations, its technology is relatively low-level, and its response is efficient and fast, crushing all other third-party terminal emulators. We started with the default terminal. 🍌

Improve PowerShell fonts

I have to admit that the default “new Song Style” of PowerShell is really good in Chinese. However, because the default PowerShell terminal is a very low-level application, its interface does not even use WinForm, WPF and other general UI rendering framework to achieve, but directly call the underlying Windows API to achieve, so its font requirements are very strict. (This is why we can’t just download a font we like to use on PowerShell default terminals.)

So far AS I know, the only font that supports this strict requirement (in Chinese) is “Sarasa Gothic/Darker body/darker body/darker body ゴ Sitkusu”. Focus on minorities and reply to “font” in the background for a download link.

More gauze black body PowerShell

After downloading, unzip and installing more bold, we can restart a PowerShell terminal and right-click on the menu bar, select “Properties – Font”, and select more bold in font. The same width font suitable for terminal use is “isometric crepe black body T SC” or “Sarasa Mono T SC”.

Configure the font for the default terminal

That way, we don’t have to worry about the new song style.

Change the color scheme for PowerShell

Colortool.exe is a handy tool for changing the color palette of PowerShell. ColorTool supports iTerm themes (theme files ending in.itermcolors).

Follow the minority and reply “0223” in the background to get the download link.

You can download the widget from ColorTool’s GitHub page. Of course, if you use Scoop, you can also install like this:

scoop install colortool
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Note that if you downloaded colortool.zip directly from GitHub and unzipped it, the colortool.exe path does not automatically add environment variables, so there is no way to call the tool globally. Therefore, I recommend using Scoop’s excellent package management to install ColorTool.

Recommended reading: “One line of code” to install and uninstall software, use Scoop to manage your Windows software

ColorTool is very simple to use. The tool comes with several themes, which can be viewed using the following command:

-s stands for schemesColorTool -s
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Several come with color themes

The.ini and.itermcolors listed above are the theme configuration files. We can set the theme directly with the following command:

Colortool -d < theme name >
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For example, if we want to change the theme color to OneHalfDark. Itermcolors, just type the following command to change and preview the update:

colortool OneHalfDark
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Replace the topic

ColorTool supports iTerm theme configuration files directly, so we can find the theme background for iterm2ColorSchemes as described above: To locate the theme file you want to change in PowerShell, use colortool < theme name >. Itermcolors to configure it. In the meantime, if you are not satisfied with any of the themes above, you can customize the theme you want and apply it in the same way at terminal.sexy.

▍ Third-party terminal

The default terminal is responsive, but it has many limitations. If you are not satisfied with the default terminal introduced above, you can also try the following three third-party terminal emulators with more convenient configuration and higher appearance level.

Fluent Terminal

Fluent Terminal is the modern and my most recommended Terminal. It is dedicated to Windows platform, the use of UWP technology to create a high level of appearance of the terminal emulator.

Follow the minority and reply “0223” in the background to get the download link.

Fluent Terminal

FluentTerminal is open source on GitHub and the project address is: Felixse /FluentTerminal. For some reason, the author did not successfully submit the software directly to the Microsoft Store, so we need to download and install it from its GitHub Release page. In general, if you have a newer version of Windows, you can use the version of No Dependencies directly, but if you have problems later in the installation process, use the first installation package.

Download the Fluent software Terminal

After unpacking, we get the following file directory:

Terminal installed Fluent

Right click install.ps1, select Run with PowerShell, and follow the instructions to Install successfully.

Fluent Terminal is much simpler to set font and theme colors:

  • In the Settings screen, we can easily choose the appropriate font.

The font of Fluent Terminal was configured

  • Also, we can set PowerShell as the default Shell in Profiles.

Configure the default Shell as PowerShell

  • It’s worth noting that Fluent Terminal also supports the iTerm theme configuration file, so the theme we just downloaded can be used here as well.

Import and use the appropriate theme

Fluent Terminal is built with native Windows 10’s latest UWP technology and is only slightly less responsive than the default PowerShell Terminal. Recommended. 👍

Hyper

The following Hyper and the following Terminus are cross-platform applications based on Electron, with easy configuration, rich plug-ins and beautiful interfaces. Of course, it is inevitable that the Electron resource consumes a lot of resources, and the opening and response are not as fast as those introduced above, but their expansions are very powerful, so you can try them.

Hyper is also open source on GitHub. The project address is: Zeit/Hyper. We can download and install Hyper on The GitHub Release page of Hyper or use Scoop Install to install Hyper.

Follow the minority and reply “0223” in the background to get the download link.

Hyper

The configuration of Hyper is relatively complex and requires direct modification of its Settings file.hyper-.js. Here I’ll just show you how to configure the default Shell and font for Hyper, and how to install themes and plug-ins.

Everything about Hyper configuration happens in the configuration file, which you can open by pressing Ctrl +, or by going directly to C:\Users\< your user name >\.hyper-.js. As you can see, there are a number of configuration items left for us to modify, including:

  • Modify font:

FontFamily: '"Sarasa Mono T SC", monospace'
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  • Change the default Shell to PowerShell:

Shell: 'C: \ \ WINDOWS \ \ System32 \ \ WindowsPowerShell \ \ v1.0 \ \ powershell exe', shellArgs: [], env: {}
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  • Install themes or other plug-ins:

Plugins: [" Hyperterm-cobalt2-theme "]
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It’s easy, then we save the configuration file, And Hyper automatically reloads it, downloads the appropriate theme or plug-in and updates it in real time. It’s just a matter of waiting for our configuration to take effect. Hyper has a great community, with a great selection of themes and plugins. You can find interesting plugins for Hyper, pick up color schemes for Hyper themes, and use the BNB /awesome- Hyper integrated repository.

Terminus

Terminus is also open source on GitHub at Eugeny/ Terminus. I actually prefer Terminus, because it has native support for Windows Fluent background, and its setup is GUI mode, which is more user-friendly.

Follow the minority and reply “0223” in the background to get the download link.

Terminus

Terminus installation is very convenient, we can also download and install Terminus from the GitHub Release page of Terminus, can also use Scoop Install Terminus to install.

Terminus is also one of the few Electron applications with Fluent Design Background. We can turn on the Fluent Background rendering here and change the Background type to Fluent:

Background designed using Fluent

Configuring the Terminus font, color scheme and default Shell is simple:

  • Here we can change the Font and Color Scheme:

Configure the font and theme

  • Here we can choose to use PowerShell as the default Shell:

Set the default Shell

Terminus is also very playable, there are also many plug-ins that can be installed, because the setting interface is very clear, I will not list them here.

💻 this article is about to end here, we:

  • Not only does it show how to modify the default terminal so that we don’t have to worry about the new Song Style and blue background every day

  • Three more modern terminals are also recommended for you to choose from

But the road to Windows terminal beautification is not over yet. Stay tuned for more on how to make PowerShell’s Shell cool. Thanks for reading.