howto.coytis.me

Powershell Themes

2 min read

How to add them

squint if you gotta, i dont really care.

The ones I don’t hate

HaX0R_GR33N (dumb name)

Duotone Dark

CyberPunk 2077

Blueberry Pie

catppuccin-mocha

How to change individual profile themes

Clankers aren’t all bad

Get-ChildItem C:\Windows\System32 | Select-Object Name, Length, LastWriteTime | Format-Table -AutoSize

Just take The Whole JSON

Random theme on every launch

Windows Terminal won’t let a tab switch its own colour scheme after it’s open, but you can repaint the current session live using OSC escape codes read straight out of the schemes array in settings.json. Drop this in $PROFILE (notepad $PROFILE) and every new shell rolls a different one of your saved schemes — nothing gets written back to settings.json, so it’s non-destructive and just re-rolls next launch.

# --- Random Windows Terminal color scheme on launch ---
function Set-RandomTerminalTheme {
    $settingsPaths = @(
        "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json"
        "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\Windows Terminal\settings.json"
    )
    $settingsFile = $settingsPaths | Where-Object { Test-Path $_ } | Select-Object -First 1
    if (-not $settingsFile) { return }
 
    $settings = Get-Content $settingsFile -Raw | ConvertFrom-Json
    $schemes  = $settings.schemes
    if (-not $schemes) { return }
 
    $theme = $schemes | Get-Random
    $esc   = [char]27
 
    $order = 'black','red','green','yellow','blue','purple','cyan','white',
             'brightBlack','brightRed','brightGreen','brightYellow',
             'brightBlue','brightPurple','brightCyan','brightWhite'
 
    for ($i = 0; $i -lt $order.Count; $i++) {
        $hex = $theme.($order[$i])
        if ($hex) { Write-Host -NoNewline "$esc]4;$i;$hex$esc\" }
    }
    if ($theme.background)  { Write-Host -NoNewline "$esc]11;$($theme.background)$esc\" }
    if ($theme.foreground)  { Write-Host -NoNewline "$esc]10;$($theme.foreground)$esc\" }
    if ($theme.cursorColor) { Write-Host -NoNewline "$esc]12;$($theme.cursorColor)$esc\" }
 
    Write-Host "Theme: $($theme.name)" -ForegroundColor DarkGray
}
 
Set-RandomTerminalTheme
  • Checks both the Store-packaged and unpackaged settings.json locations, whichever exists.
  • Picks from every scheme in the schemes array by default. To limit it to specific ones (e.g. just the favourites above), filter first: $schemes | Where-Object { $_.name -in 'Dracula','Nord','Gruvbox' } | Get-Random.

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