Windows Terminal Preview v1.16 introduces appearance customization

Windows Terminal Preview 1.16 is pre-released, and its main highlight is the customization you can perform. Specifically, you can decide the tab colors, themes, and background images for Windows Terminal Preview in this release.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-preview-1-16-release/

The ability to change the appearance of the app should make it more colorful and give you more ways to help it complement your machine setup. However, it has a small problem: knowledge about editing JSON files is required. After editing, the files can be easily accessed via the Theme drop-down menu in the settings UI.

In this release, the default colors in Windows Terminal have also been revised for "a more cohesive look". This way, the terminal will start using the dark theme as the default theme instead of using the PC's system theme.

"The reasoning behind this change is that the color scheme is dark by default, but our window theme is set to System," explains II Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code. "The system theme in Windows 11 defaults to a light color unless changed by the user. This presents a conflict between themes and color schemes in Terminal. Given that Terminal has historically had a black background in its Campbell color scheme, in order to achieve a consistent UI Experience, instead of having a color scheme with a light background, we decided to change the window theme to dark by default."

Also, this version allows you to set the opening position of new tabs, either at the end of all tabs or after the currently selected tab. Additionally, Microsoft is releasing an experimental text rendering engine that will become the default text renderer for all profiles. "The new renderer is more performant and now supports additional pixel shaders (including retro effects), bold text and underline/overline/hyperlink lines," details Cinnamon. "If your machine doesn't have a GPU, or you're remotely connecting to a virtual machine that doesn't have a GPU, it will fall back to a higher performance mode that doesn't require hardware support."

Other changes made include an updated Settings UI color scheme page with its new "Set as Default" button, a new expandSelectionToWord action, other small miscellaneous improvements, and bug fixes.

Official website

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases