In this post I will show you how you can add a background picture to Windows Terminal.

Settings

Open Settings either by the keyboard shortcut of CTRL + , or click the down arrow on the Windows Terminal tab bar.

The settings, which is a JSON file will be displayed using the editor configured for working with JSON files.

Whilst there are four settings available to set and control how the background image will look, this post will focus on the following two:

• backgroundImage which is used to set the file location of the image that you want to use. The image can be in .jpg, .png, or .gif formats
• backgroundImageOpacity sets transparency of the image.

Here are these settings added to my PowerShell profile:

...
{
  // Make changes here to the powershell.exe profile.
  "guid": "{61c54bbd-c2c6-5271-96e7-009a87ff44bf}",
  "name": "Windows PowerShell",
  "commandline": "powershell.exe",
  "hidden": false,
  "backgroundImage" : "C:/TerminalBackground/19065_en_1.jpg",
  "backgroundImageOpacity" : 0.55
},
...

You can move the Opacity levels up or down to suite.

Setting the backgroundImage globally?

Start a command prompt from Windows Terminal and you can see the background photo visible in PowerShell is not displayed. This is expected behavior because the background image was set within the PowerShell profile.

So the next question you may have is instead of setting the image at an individual profile level such as PowerShell, can I set it at a global level? At the time of this post I was using version 1.0.1401.0 and the ability to set a background image using the Windows Terminal global settings was not available.

Need help with this? Please email me.