Customize Windows Terminal for WSL 2 - The Basics

hey guys what's up everyone welcome back to a new video in today's video i'm going to show you how to customize windows terminal in last week's video we have covered how to install wsl2 and windows terminal on windows 10 and we just went through the basic configuration steps or the basic installation steps and we should be all at the same page now so as i promised in last week's video today we are going to look at windows terminal customization so we will not go over the top in this video that means we will literally just look at the customization options that windows terminal itself offers and i think this is pretty sufficient for most people and if you really want to go down the rabbit hole into all the nitty-gritty details of windows terminal customization then you have to stay tuned for next week's video where we will actually cover installing zh oh my set is age and all those kind of things where we go really deep into terminal customization but as i said for the most part i think this will be enough you can get a really really nice decent looking terminal uh just by going through the options of windows terminal but with all that being said let's dive right in guys before we get started though let me quickly introduce you to today's sponsor izoic uh if you have been following me for a while you probably have heard about izoic or have heard me talk about izoic already izoic is a artificial intelligence that provides ads on your blog or on your website very much like google adsense but they are working much much better they are a google certified publishing partner which is very important if you run any kind of ads on your blog to not get blacklisted and what it is it's basically a artificial intelligence that intelligently places ads on your website without interfering with user experience now i've used i've been using them on my own blog cosec.com for the past three years and i'm very happy with them not only because they provide ads but because they provide a 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test from google that was just introduced back in may as i said i'm really happy with this platform if you decide to sign up for them either go ahead pull up the article i highly recommend you reading through that anyway and then use my link to sign up with them then they will provide a white glove service to you with their onboarding and will give you a very easy time on jumping on board there's also a link in the video description below to sign up so if you have just followed last week's video this is probably what you are currently looking at this is how windows terminal looks right out of the box it's not the nicest experience as well as uh if you do this and then you hit tab twice and something is not working you hear this audible bing this is what we're gonna get rid of guys don't worry um but this is just one of the things i'm going to show you so just memorize how it looks now it's pretty pretty lame pretty dull nothing spectacular at all so to go into the settings of windows terminal you click on this little error up here and then you open up the settings menu once in here there are a couple of default settings or general settings we can also go ahead and open this menu here then you see the menu structure so the first things we are going to cover are the basic or the general ws sorry windows terminal options here and those options i think only apply on the default apps that you choose so the really uh the customization of the wsl2 installations will be on the end so we will cover that in a second but first let's go through all of the options the important part here that you can choose from is the default profile and the default profile is usually set to your favorite uh distribution so for me that's ubuntu 2004 so i leave it as it is as it currently is actually let's change it for the sake of this tutorial to ubuntu 1804 does not matter then you can choose to launch the machine on startup that's pretty self-explanatory and you can choose some startup behavior like the launch mode if it's maximized full screen focused whatever and you can also change the new instance a behavior which means creating a new window attached to the most recently used window and stuff like this so i didn't really change anything here except the default profile and if you want to play around with that go ahead give it a go give it a look and just see what happens when you change one of those options next up are the interaction options so if we go here then we can see there's a couple of text formatting options automatically copying a selection to the clipboard so if you mark anything with your mouse that would automatically copy it to your clipboard i don't really want to have that because if you press the right or if you mark something on your on your screen and then you right-click then it's copied anyway so this is fine for me i didn't change anything here either you can remove the trailing white space in rectangular selection and you can change the word delimiters that might be important if you do some programming um snap window resizing to character grid pretty self-explanatory as well and then there is a tab switcher or the tab switcher interface style and you can play around with this this is more like a convenient option um i didn't change anything in there to be honest this option i really like so in case it's switched off for you i highly recommend you to switch it on that is automatically detect urls and make them clickable so if you run any kind of server like a django server or something from your terminal you can just control click on it and a browser window will automatically open okay next up we have the appearance window here then we can change or here we can change the language i just leave it as system default then we can choose if we want a dark or a light team and i always click use windows team for that so it's basically if you run a windows dark windows theme that will also use that but whatever you choose here it's pretty obvious that it will change that to a light screen theme so next up is always show tabs you can remove the tabs if you would like to you can hide the title bar if you would like to or you can use the active terminal title as the application title i'll just leave that as it is always on top i don't need that either and the tap width mode is equal you can make it compact and the tabs will be a little bit smaller depending on your screen size so this might make sense or not and if you run into any performance issues you could switch off paint animations here let's look at color schemes next now anything you change here doesn't really affect your ubuntu because we have to change the appearance of our ubuntu installation separately so i actually don't know what this is doing i think this is just the default setting uh i played around with that a bit but it's not really applying to anything that i have installed so i didn't really get it uh what that does because if we change anything here we change this and we save it nothing really changes in our ubuntu installation and neither does it change in our command prompt so i really don't know what those settings are doing but um well you can play around with it if you like all right let's go over to the next one which is the rendering options i never did anything here but you could redraw the entire screen when displaying updates or you could go ahead and use software rendering in case you would run into any issues with your gpu now the last section here from the basic uh windows terminal options are the keyboard shortcuts or the keyboard actions and i highly recommend you checking those out because those can boost your productivity by quite a lot so i use a couple of those shortcuts on my daily workflow like close window close pane stuff like this copying text even i said this is just the right mouse click copies the text also increase and decrease front side duplicate panes and and all this kind of stuff just look through that for example making a new tab switching to next tabs control tab there's a really good basic setup there but in case would you like to change those shortcuts you have to do it in the settings json file which i will show you on the end of this video okay we made it now we can actually go to the part that you actually all came here for which is the wsl2 customization so you open this pane here and you just select your distribution that you want to adjust now i'm going to do the ubuntu 18 that we just installed um but this those settings apply to all of those profiles that you see here so you can modify powershell the same way you can modify the command prompt in the same way and so on and so forth so let's go to ubuntu or ubuntu installation if it lets me and the first thing you can do in the general options here is to change the name of the distribution i already did that just now and you can just call it whatever you want i just call it ubuntu tutorial zero sec or whatever ubuntu tutorial that's fine and uh then you can change the command line argument this is this already starting parameters so you could uh change that to something else i never had the need to do that so just recognize that it's there you could go ahead and change the starting directory if you wanted to because you know if you pull up wsl 2 it automatically defaults into your mounted windows path where the actual wsl installation resides so if you would like to change that to something else like your home user profile which in that case would be we go to cd domain directory here and then we would do wsl path minus w for windows and then dot for the current directory then we see that this is the home path of our ubuntu installation so if you wanted it to not default to the actual c drive because this is mounting the c drive and your user directory on windows you could do this and put that in here and then it would always automatically default into the starting directory like it would be in a real linux installation or in a actual linux installation next up you could change the icon here if you really needed to if you want to really want to change this linux penguin to something else well you can do that you can also change the tab title which is this right here to something else if you want or you can also go ahead and hide the profile from the drop down um as a last thing you can delete the profile but this only deletes the profile out of ws out of windows terminal it does not delete your actual wsl2 installation so this actually i never had to use it i didn't see a reason for it but with all of those changes let's just go ahead and save that right now and then let's go ahead and close wsl 2 and reopen it again if it lets us okay so i pulled it over from the other screen and as you can see we are in fact now in our default distribution which is ubuntu uh tutorial and we are in our home directory and not anymore in the user profile directory all right let's go back into the settings there and then let's go back to ubuntu tutorial down here and let's check out the next window which is appearance and this is probably the most interesting part for all of you guys this is where you choose how windows terminal appears and you can choose this nice acrylic effect that you see already in the background right here um all right let's do exactly this so you can see a preview here of all the changes change the changes you are doing god damn it that is a hard word and then you can choose that right here and see it reflected right there all right so for the color scheme we can choose whatever we want i quite like the tango dark it's a really nice one i quite like that it's supple solarized you see it reflected right here if you choose solarized but i'll stick with the tango one that's fine i think you can also do custom ones or vintage you could do vintage whatever let's do tango dark now and then you can obviously choose the font face i like consoles because it's a little bit more compact you can also click on show all fonts which shows you all the fonts that you have actually installed on your pc and then i definitely want to increase the font size here because the font size is rather small so i'm going to bump that up to 14 directly reflected up here for the font weight i usually like to go for something like either light or zoomy light for this purpose let's take didn't change much okay let's do yeah this is already a pretty light font this more applies to like a bigger font like a fatter font but anyway i go with light for now and then let's just click save and and check out how that looks right now okay so this looks much better than it did before i think already a tiny bit better that could be still a little bit bigger the the font there but we leave it as it is maybe we bump it up to 15 for now okay um and then there is the retro terminal effects now this is a option that some people would probably really like and some people probably can't deal with at all i found it to be quite hard to read the text over time so if you read a lot of text in the terminal it can put a strain on your eyes but it does look really cool and cyberpunk like so if you switch it on and you click on save then you see this like a retro terminal kind of thing you know like it's a lot of like uh lines through the through the font and stuff like this i quite like it it doesn't look as cool yet as it will be in a second so just let's let's keep that option checked and then let's move on to the cursor here completely your own preference i'm gonna choose the vintage one i quite like that you can also choose a box or something like this let's just click on save and see how that looks like all right now we have it down here and i think this is like pretty pretty vintage pretty cool this is how the alt terminal windows look like do we have h top here yeah we have h top okay so this is a little bit a better reflection of the colors right there okay uh let's let's move on there so we have chosen our cursor now we can go ahead and we can actually use a background image for our terminal so you can either go ahead and use the desktop wallpaper which is pretty self-explanatory so it will look kind of like this which is pretty weird i have to say to have the same thing there that i have on my windows background but you get the idea right so we can also go ahead and choose something else that makes a little bit more sense what about we choose my my image from my sense course no that's that's a joke of course what about we choose the hacker background there if anything else better no okay let's choose the hacker background thing there because this is something you guys will probably dig all right there we go now this looks pretty sick it's not very easy to read the font anymore and this is partly because we activated the retro terminal if you do h-top yeah legit okay let's move on so we have uh what else do we have here so we choose a background image and i'm gonna remove that in a second again you can also choose how to do that we can fill it it's probably a better way to do that right let's fill it up there okay looks a bit that looks a bit stretchy and weird but it's also kind of cool we just cannot read the font but anyway if you are in there and then you play around with it and choose some background image you can of course adjust it and this is where the opacity comes into play i think that will help us quite a bit so if you put that down to like 60 percent opacity boom now we can already read our uh text much better if we let's let's pull it down to like 30 maybe 30ish percent and that's much better right now we can read it we have our background image there and so on and so forth so this is pretty nice um okay what else do we have here next comes text formatting uh text formatting i usually use bold font with bright colors because i like my terminal fairly bright see how that reflected boom see that that's that's shining like it's much more shiny than it was before let's pull h top up okay looks quite cool it looks a little bit over the top though don't worry we're gonna make it beautiful in a second i'm just actually playing around with that myself a little bit here you can choose on the bottom by the way to change the scroll bar visibility if you don't want to have a scroll bar there i usually like that and you can choose the window padding the padding means how far is the font away from the corners see now it moved kind of in the middle uh also the image seemed to be moving in the middle um but we usually don't need that like we leave it on default like eight or nine or something like this to have more space in our terminal okay so the last option i'm going to show you here is acrylic and i actually don't know how that works now with the background image in place um but let's just switch it on okay now this is really weird because now we have like an acrylic effect and we have our background image so it kind of looks cool but you would need to play around with it a little bit more now what i usually like to do with my terminal is this i would like to remove this background image again so we don't want to have a background image okay so we remove that and i just want to use the acrylic effect and i'll put the opacity down probably to somewhere around 50 so that it's really translucent and now if you look at that oh yeah if you have a nice background image on your pc [Music] then this looks really really cool i really like this effect you can play around with the opacity it's like a glassy effect or glass morphism as they call it in uh web design um i'm actually gonna put that on more towards like 40 percent okay and then there's one more thing i want to do so bold font with bright colors is a little bit too much for me so i just do bright colors there and this should make it look way more pleasant here okay there we go now what else do we have here we have the advanced options let's have a look at the advanced options finally there is not a lot we're going to change here but there is some things we are going to change here for example the text anti-ali anti-aliasing i like to have my text alized which makes it a little bit more smooth then this is switched on per default and i have no reason to switch it off um the profile termination behavior you can change that to uh some other option here if you wanted to but the really important thing is down here at the bottom this bell notification that i mentioned in the beginning when you hit double tap and something is not working and it's just beeping i hate this so i'm gonna switch this off from audible to flash window and if you switch it over to flash window it actually looks pretty pleasant and pretty old school so if you type something in like clear and it doesn't work you see that boom see this white flash i definitely like that way more than the bell alright guys now we have already a pretty sick looking terminal and now if you actually go over i think to the color scheme and we change this from campbell to tango dark or whatever or let's do solarize to have it a little bit more prominent no it does not change anything on the colors of the prompt so i really don't know how to change this if you guys know that maybe let me know let's change this green to something else because what i want to do is i want to change this and i know we can do that in settings json but i don't know if we can do that here actually so there is no option in here for that even in the appearance tab you cannot change really the color we can do that in the settings json file which we will talk about next but even like this if this is enough for you uh it's a pretty pretty sick looking terminal it's a very functional and fast terminal as well and if this is enough for you be happy with it you don't need to dive into any csh stuff and any further customization if you are fine with that all right for everyone else let's open up the settings json file by clicking down on the bottom here on settings.json now even just a couple of months ago this was the way on how you would modify your settings in windows terminal but they implemented all of those changes and made everything more available into in the gui and i really really like that now you can see that here this is the list or this is the the object of our default settings and we can see right here those are the guids of our installations and i know that probably last one will be the ubuntu because we have consoles as a font and we have this font size that's what we just modified and as you can see here we can change some thing here and you can pull up the documentation of windows terminal and in there you will find all of the options that you can change so there you can actually go ahead and change the color of this and and all this kind of stuff if you really wanted to it looks something like this and this what you would need to apply so you would create a new scheme a new color scheme and then you would put that scheme into your object here but i think this goes a little bit too far this goes a little bit over the top when it comes to windows terminal customization and we just wanted to cover the basics i just wanted to show you that the options are there but if you are interested in changing those i actually highly recommend you to stick around until next week's video where we will talk about installing zsh and installing oh my zsh and stuff like this as a final step or a final information for you i just show you my current terminal now here it does not look that great i didn't go into much customization here but this is basically um zsh with power tools 10k or power yeah power tools 10k and this is how it can look like with s8 you have auto completion there and all the suggestions so if we have i think i just deleted everything there so if we have something like this and we do cd and if you do that a couple of times then you will get all the suggestions all the time like uh let's see what do we have here yeah i i just deleted this folder that's why it's not really working but you can actually see that it automatically recognizes that this project is in fact hooked up with git so we are on master and we are two changes behind the actual uh repository on github so you can see the changes reflected here you could also see if you are actually on a branch and not on master so all this kind of stuff you can modify with zsh and power tools and oh my zsh which we will talk about in the next video all right guys this video turned out to be a lot longer than i intended it to be but i hope it was a good information for you guys i hope now you can enjoy a better looking terminal i always feel like if i have a good looking terminal i am more likely to actually work with it because i enjoy just looking at it how cool it looks with this acrylic effect effect and stuff like this so i'm simply more likely to just open up the terminal and hack away in it than i would be if i have a old ass ugly terminal that is just like a black background with green font yeah stay tuned for next week's video guys where we will talk about all my status age and set as h in general maybe i do a short zsh primer actually once you switch over to set as h from bash it's really hard to go back because they have so many cool plugins like this auto suggest or or syntax highlighter and stuff like this that makes it really really hard to go back to classic bash shells but don't be worried it's really easy to learn set as age it's not much different from bash in terms of commands and i will show you that if you have any suggestions what you would want to learn about wsl 2 says age windows terminal whatever leave it in the comment below and also make sure to check out the sponsor of today's video izoic if you run a blog i highly highly recommend them they are a great company with a great team and i hope to see you back in next week's video don't forget to leave a thumbs up until then [Music]

Channel: Stefan Rows

Views: 1,075

Keywords: customize windows terminal, windows terminal customization, how to customize windows terminal, customize windows terminal for wsl 2, modify windows terminal, change windows terminal background, change windows terminal background image, windows terminal guide, windows terminal wsl 2, wsl windows terminal, wsl 2 windows terminal, best wsl 2 terminal

Id: qiLJhG0O51M

Length: 26min 15sec (1575 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021