If you hadn’t noticed, I have been involved with writing several books as well as various blogs and journal contributions. One of the challenges when it comes to books particularly is when wanting to share a screenshot of a shell/console Window, be that a Linux shell (bash, ZSH, korn etc) Windows cmd or PowerShell.

The issue is that by default these UIs have black or dark backgrounds with white text. For a blog, or online content it isn’t really an issue, other than possibly aesthetic reasons. But when it comes to printing you’re likely to find the book editors asking if the colours can be reversed to avoid quality problems for printing (and cost i.e. less ink).

Until recently, I hadn’t found an elegant way to toggle colour settings back and forth, as I prefer the dark background when working normally (for a start its all the visual cues about what the screen is). Microsoft has been working on a new terminal app called Windows Terminal. I have to admit to being suspicious, as I understand it, PowerShell and it’s UI was meant to do away with the cmd shell. Windows Terminal is meant to supersede the cmd shell and having worked with it, I think it will comfortably tick that box and more. Microsoft have made the beta edition and support tools available via GitHub if you’re so inclined as they’re running the development as an open source project.

Whilst it is now possible to configure the look of the terminal, that’s the beginning as we can configure the drop down option create tabs of the shells with different configurations.