How to Change Background Image in Windows Terminal

Here's how to change Background image in Windows Terminal and set it to a custom wallpaper. Windows Terminal is a relatively new application for Windows 10 that combines conventional command line tools and shells. You can use Windows Terminal as a replacement for Windows Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux. Windows Terminal has several benefits: tabs support, hardware-accelerated font rendering, UTF-8 and Unicode support, and dozens of customization options. Sure, personalization is not the most requested feature from power users relying on command-line-based tools. Still, it is nice to have some options to make software yours or separate it from other tasks.

In this article, we will show how to change the background in Windows Terminal. If you do not like the default black background, Windows Terminal allows setting up any image or even GIF as the background. Cute cats for the Command Prompt background? Yes, please!

It is worth mentioning that Windows Terminal allows you to set up images as backgrounds for different profiles and environments, for example, one picture for PowerShell and another one for Command Prompt, and so on.

How to Change Background Image in Windows Terminal

1. Begin with updating Windows Terminal to the latest version from GitHub or the Microsoft Store.
2. Launch Windows Terminal and click the arrow-down button in the tabs panel.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu. Alternatively, press Ctrl + , (Ctrl and comma).
4. Select one of the profiles available in the left panel. Click the one you want to set a background image for.
5. Go to the Appearance tab.
6. Scroll down to the Background section. Here, specify the path to the image or automatically set your current desktop background as a Windows Terminal background. To do that, check the Use Desktop Wallpaper checkbox.
7. To set a custom background in Windows Terminal, click Browse and select an image of your choice.
8. Click Save to apply the changes. This action will apply the default background settings to the image you have just selected.

If you are not satisfied with how your image looks in Windows Terminal, there are several additional customization options. These settings work similarly to how the desktop background works. You can change how Windows Terminal fills the background with the image using the Background image stretch mode parameter. Also, use Background alignment to reposition your image, and Background image opacity to make it more or less transparent.

In recent releases, Windows Terminal has a convenient GUI-based settings section that makes setting up and customizing the app more user-friendly for those new to the app. But every option has a corresponding parameter in a JSON configuration file that stores all the Windows Terminal settings.

Here is how you can set an image as the Windows Terminal background by editing the JSON file.

Set Windows Terminal Wallpaper in the JSON file

1. Open File Explorer.
2. Path the following into the address bar: %localappdata%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState.
3. Right-click the settings.json file and select Edit.
4. Scroll down and find the "profiles:" line. In the list of profiles, find the one you need to change. Look for a line similar to "name": "Command Prompt".
5. Press Enter above or below "name" and enter "backgroundimage": "PATH". Substitute the PATH portion with the full path to the image, for example, "backgroundImage": "C:\\Users\\Taras\\OneDrive\\Pictures\\Wallpapers\\Terminal.jpg". Use double backslashes when specifying the path to the image file.
6. Place a comma at the end.
7. You can specify additional properties, such as "backgroundimagealignment" and "backgroundimageopacity". See the screenshot below that demonstrates how to set these parameters.
8. Save the changes.
9. Restart Windows Terminal.

You are done.

Tip: To make things a bit easier, launch Windows Terminal and press the arrow-down button in the tab row. Select Settings > Open JSON file.

That's it.

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