How to add a new profile in Windows Terminal

In this blog post, we will discuss how to add a new profile in Windows Terminal application and provide some customization like cursor shape, its color, background image, etc. Here we will use cmd.exe and create a new profile for it.

If you are completely new to Windows Terminal, then I would highly recommend you to go through the introductory post of installing and understanding Windows Terminal configurations. At the time of writing the current version of Windows Terminal is 1.0

“Windows Terminal is a modern terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Its main features include multiple tabs, panes, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, a GPU accelerated text rendering engine, and the ability to create your own themes and customize text, colors, backgrounds, and shortcut key bindings“. [source: Microsoft Docs]

Prerequisite

• Window Terminal – Should be installed [How to install Windows Terminal]

Add a new profile in Windows Terminal – cmd.exe

Here in this example, we are going to add cmd.exe as a new profile into Windows Terminal, the first step is to get its location, in Windows 10, it can be found under the Windows\System32 directory. We will create a new profile and add a little customization to it. The same steps can be used to adding different shell applications.

Add New Profile in settings.json

In order to add the profile open the settings.json file, and then add the JSON into the profiles list. To open the settings.json file use the “Ctrl + ,” shortcut, or select the Settings menu item from the drop-down. The settings.json file will be opened in your configured JSON editor.

Now, we will add the following JSON into the profiles list. This is the minimum JSON required to add the profile. Later we will add new key-value pairs to add further customization configurations. The below code practically does nothing, and we need to provide proper values to every JSON key.

{
     // New  profile bare minimum JSON 
    "guid": "{NEW GUID}",
    "name": "profile-name",
    "commandline": "PATH TO cmd.exe"
},

Configure Key-Value for the Profile

Here we provide proper values to each of the key’s in the profile object.

Configure GUID: We require a unique GUID value, for this, we will use the online tool to get a new GUID and paste the same inside the curly braces. When I generated the GUID I got the following value, so my key-value looks like this.

“guid”: “{9b62e67e-0b47-4867-adae-c3c22ad8161f}”

Configure Name: We can choose any name as per our choice, this is the name of the profile. I will pick Go-CMD as my profile name.

“name”: “Go-CMD”

Configure cmdPath: In the commandline key, we will provide the path of cmd.exe. For me, the path for cmd.exe is C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe, so the key-value looks like this. Please note the escape the backslash in the path.

“commandline”: “C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe”

So the JSON for our new Go-CMD profile looks like this. Save the settings.json file.

{
     // Go-Cmd profile
    "guid": "{9b62e67e-0b47-4867-adae-c3c22ad8161f}",
    "name": "Go-CMD",
    "commandline": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe"
},

Execute the Go-Cmd Profile

Open the Go-Cmd profile the drop-down list.

Optional Configurations

Add Icon

Let us add an icon to the profile we added, to add the same we need to use the following JSON string. This will add the icon to the profile tab as well as the profile list in the drop-down menu. Please add the path to your icon file.

“icon”: “C:\\console.png”

Change Cursor Shape and Color

Let us change the cursor shape to filledBox and its color to red, for this we are going to add the following to key-value pair to the profile.

“cursorShape”: “filledBox”,
“cursorColor”: “#FF0000”

The complete JSON for the Go-CMD is as follows:

{
        // Go-Cmd profile
        "guid": "{9b62e67e-0b47-4867-adae-c3c22ad8161f}",
        "name": "Go-CMD",
        "commandline": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe",
        "icon": "C:\\console.png",
        "cursorShape": "filledBox",
        "cursorColor": "#FFFF00"
}

---

Window Terminal can be customized as per your need, the terminal allows you to customize its color, background image, themes, cursor, tabs, panes, etc. If you want to customize further you can have a look at How to customize Windows Terminal Application post. All in all, it a great tool to manage different shells all in one place.

I hope you find the post on how to add a profile to Windows Terminal helpful. Thanks for visiting, Cheers!!!

[Further Readings: How to easily Customize Global Settings in Windows Terminal |  How to add Git Bash to Windows Terminal Application |  How to customize Windows Terminal Application |  How to customize Windows Terminal Key Bindings |  How to Install Windows Terminal in Windows 10 |  Important Debugging Shortcuts of Visual Studio 2019 |  How to publish a Blazor Server Application to IIS |  Top 7 Visual Studio 2019 extensions for Web Projects |  The difference in Blazor Server and WebAssembly Application |  Exploring Blazor WebAssembly App Project Structure |  Top 10 Productivity Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio 2019 |  CRUD Operations in WPF using EntityFrameworkCore and SQLite ]