In the new update of Windows 10, Microsoft has replaced all previous “cmd.exe” shortcuts with PowerShell shortcuts. Previously you were able to launch command prompt window (cmd.exe) from the power user menu that opens through Win+X key combination, from the file menu of any Windows File Explorer window or from the context-menu opened by right-clicking in any folder while pressing the “Shift” key. But starting with Windows 10 version 1803, all of these shortcuts for “cmd.exe” are now replaced with PowerShell.
In future versions of Windows, “cmd.exe” will be completely replaced with PowerShell and for this reason, it is better to get along and start using PowerShell – more so because it supports all the commands from the dated “cmd.exe” console. Perhaps a little customization of the appearance of the PowerShell console will help in the following manner.
- Launch PowerShell, right-click on the console window’s title bar and select Properties from the menu.
- In order to change the font used for PowerShell console, switch to the Fonts tab and pick one of the fonts from the list. It is better to pick the mono-spaced fonts or console fonts. If you don’t like the fonts installed in your Windows PC, you can try downloading more fonts from http://www.fontspace.com/ and installing them in your PC.
- For changing the colors used in the PowerShell console, switch to the Colors tab. From here, you can select colors for the screen text, screen background, popup text and popup background. There are 16 predefined colors that you can choose but you can also customize the colors by picking an RGB value. There are also options to set the opacity of the console – using this option, you can make PowerShell console look more like the Terminal in Ubuntu Linux.
These are the easiest and quickest steps towards the customization of the PowerShell console. There are other PowerShell script based methods too, but they require knowledge of PowerShell scripting.