I could probably make an entire course on all the different
terminal settings and features.
It's not practical to try to cover them all here,
but I hope I can give you a sense of what's possible and show you
how to find and experiment with settings you might find useful.
I've already got a terminal open here at the bottom of my window.
I'll click on the dropdown arrow in the upper right corner of the
panel to open the terminal menu.
From here, I'll select "Configure Terminal Settings."
That opens up the visual settings editor we explored earlier
in the course.
Notice that the search box at the top is pre-populated with the text
@feature:terminal.
That's the syntax to filter settings by a particular
application feature,
the terminal in this case.
Also notice in the hierarchical view on the left that there are 98
terminal-related settings in this version of VS Code.
If you're the kind of developer that really likes to tweak your
environment and get everything exactly how you want it,
then I'll encourage you to browse the whole list when you have
time. For the rest of you,
you can further filter these results by adding additional
search text in the box above.
For instance, I'll add a space in the word "linux" to the end
of the current search.
I'm now seeing just the eight terminal settings that are
specific to running VS Code on Linux.
If you're on a Mac, you can change that to osx.
That filtered the list of five settings.
As you might expect, you can see Window specific
settings by searching for Windows.
Instead of Windows, I'll search for cursor.
Now, you can see some of the settings that affect the
terminal cursor.
I'll change the cursor style from block to underline.
Another popular thing to tweak in the terminal is the font.
I'll change the font size from 14 to 16.
As we saw earlier in the course, some settings you're required to
change directly in the settings.json file.
I'll click the icon in the upper right corner that switches me
to the settings.json editor.
You can see the last two settings in the file are the changes I just
made to the terminal cursor style and font size.
The filter on the UI editor showed 98 terminal related settings,
but there are actually more than that.
That was just those under the top level terminal settings key
like those two here.
If you want to customize colors within your chosen color theme,
you have to add the workbench.colorCustomization setting
to this file.
Its value is a JSON object with additional terminal options.
I'll first add terminal.background.
When I pressed the tab key, VS Code defaulted the value to red.
If you know the code for the color you want,
you can just type it here.
However, you can also click on the color sample and choose your
color from a picker.
I'll click it and choose black.
I'll add one more setting to this object to change the
foreground color.
The property for it is terminal.foreground.
I'll again use the color picker and this time
choose a shade of green.
Now that I've made several small changes to the appearance
of my terminals, I'll open a new one and
see how they look.
It looks good, at least to me.
I like the colors, the larger font, and the
new underline cursor.
Take some time to experiment and find the terminal settings
you like.
However, this isn't quite the end of the ways you can customize
your terminals.
Up next, I'll show you how to create terminal profiles for the
different types of terminals you use.