TerminalStyles

Switch terminal themes live. Run tstyles, arrow through 16 themes previewing each one in your current tab — Enter keeps it, Esc reverts to exactly how it looked before. The palette, the cursor color and the prompt repaint instantly on any terminal that speaks OSC; on Windows Terminal the font, opacity and animated background come with them. All in one command, all non-destructive.

Works on Windows Terminal, macOS Terminal.app, iTerm2, and any terminal that speaks OSC color sequences — and in zsh and bash, not just PowerShell. Runs on PowerShell 7 and Windows PowerShell 5.1. Keep your own prompt (Oh My Posh / Starship) with tstyles <name> -KeepPrompt.

umbrella	eva	ex-machina	forest
garden-rain	gitbash	golden-forest	halo
kitty	lain	marquee	neon-rain
rain	snowday	sober	tombraider

Install

Install-PSResource -Name TerminalStyles
Import-Module TerminalStyles -DisableNameChecking

Add the Import-Module line to your $PROFILE so it loads on every new shell tab — or run tstyles register once and it does that for you (both pwsh 7 and Windows PowerShell 5.1 $PROFILE files, with a confirm prompt first). Then:

tstyles

Arrow keys preview each style live, Enter keeps it, Esc cancels.

Alternate: bootstrap installer

For setups without PSResourceGet (rare on modern Windows; ships natively in pwsh 7.4+), use the bootstrap one-liner installer instead. It also auto-registers the loader in your $PROFILE:

iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fcreme/TerminalStyles/main/install.ps1 | iex

This downloads to %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\, registers a loader for every PowerShell engine it finds, and offers to fix restrictive execution policies if needed. Once it finishes, run tstyles immediately in the same tab.

The bootstrap install and the PSGallery install can coexist — whichever your $PROFILE loads wins; the other is orphaned silently.

Use

Interactive picker

PS C:\> tstyles

Arrow-key menu, with a 5-color swatch next to each style so you can see the palette before previewing:

  Choose a style for 'PowerShell'
  Up/Down to preview, Enter to keep, Esc to cancel

   > umbrella         ██████████
     eva              ██████████
     ex-machina       ██████████
     ...

As you arrow up/down, the terminal actually changes in real time: the palette, the foreground and the cursor color, on every terminal that speaks OSC. On Windows Terminal the font, opacity and background GIF follow a beat later, once the keypresses stop. Press Enter to keep the highlighted style, Esc to revert to how things looked before you ran tstyles.

Subcommands

tstyles umbrella                  # Apply a specific style directly (no picker)
tstyles list                      # List all themes; '*' marks the active one
tstyles current                   # Print just the active style name
tstyles random                    # Pick a random style and apply it
tstyles reset                     # Revert the active profile to its unstyled default
tstyles tune [name]               # Live-tune brightness/saturation/opacity/font; save as a style
tstyles font [name]               # List coding fonts, or install one and apply it
tstyles register                  # Auto-add `Import-Module TerminalStyles ...` to both $PROFILE files
tstyles update                    # PSGallery: Update-PSResource. Bootstrap: re-run installer.
tstyles uninstall                 # Remove module + strip $PROFILE loader. Preserves user state.
tstyles uninstall -DeleteData     # As above, plus delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\ entirely.
tstyles help [command]            # Show all commands, or details for one

Tab completion works on the subcommand and style names: tstyles u<TAB> cycles umbrella, uninstall, update.

Tuning a theme

tstyles tune            # tune the active style
tstyles tune eva        # tune a specific style

Opens a live editor with arrow-key sliders for brightness, saturation, opacity, font face, and font size. Up/Down selects a knob, Left/Right adjusts it, R resets colors, Enter saves, Esc reverts. Colors retint instantly; opacity/font follow a beat later (one Windows Terminal reload).

The font face knob cycles every monospace font installed on your machine (curated favorites first), so your own coding fonts show up automatically.

On save you choose Overwrite (shadows the theme you tuned) or Save as a new name. The result lands in your user-styles dir as a full style — so it shows up in tstyles list, the picker, and tab-completion, and survives updates. It inherits the base theme's background, and a small tune.json remembers your adjustments so tstyles tune <name> resumes where you left off.

Installing a coding font

tstyles font                      # list the catalog, with installed/installable markers
tstyles font 'JetBrains Mono'     # install it (if needed) and apply it to the active profile

Six curated fonts are available — JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, Cascadia Code, Hack, Source Code Pro, and IBM Plex Mono. Each is downloaded from its official GitHub release, checked against a pinned SHA-256 before anything is unpacked, and installed per-user into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts — no administrator rights needed, and nothing is written outside your profile.

Already-installed fonts are detected and skipped, so re-running the command is cheap. Once a font is installed it also shows up in the tstyles tune font-face knob and in the picker, alongside the monospace fonts you already had.

The first time you run tstyles, a one-time prompt offers to install the whole set. Decline it and you're never asked again — tstyles font is always there if you change your mind.

Keeping your own prompt (Oh My Posh / Starship)

Applying a style normally also sets that style's prompt and banner. If you run a prompt engine like Oh My Posh or Starship, add -KeepPrompt to get the style's colors, cursor, font, and background without touching your prompt:

tstyles eva -KeepPrompt        # eva's look; your prompt stays

The scriptable apply.ps1 accepts the same flag (apply.ps1 -KeepPrompt, with -NoProfile kept as an alias). Note: a -KeepPrompt apply isn't reported by tstyles current / the * in tstyles list, because active-style detection is prompt-based.

Resetting a profile

To undo theming and return a profile to Windows Terminal's plain default:

tstyles reset                  # the active profile
tstyles reset -Target 'Ubuntu' # a specific profile

This strips the colors, cursor, font, opacity, and background a style added, removes the now-unused color scheme, and restores your own prompt (open a new tab to see it). It's the inverse of applying a style, and writes a settings.json.bak first. Fields you set on the profile by hand are left alone.

Styles

Sixteen themes ship out of the box. Click any name to jump to that style's folder for full palette / prompt / theme.json details.

umbrella

Resident-Evil / survival-horror. Blood-red brackets, bone-white text, three-line classified-doc prompt with a startup banner. "Welcome to Umbrella Corporation. Status: FINE."

eva

Evangelion / Asuka body-scan. Coral-red CRT palette with mustard yellow status overlay. NERV operations banner. "Anta baka?"

ex-machina

Ava body-scan / Bluebook research. Cold electric cyan wireframe with a coral pink accent. "You've been programmed and fed by another. Are you bothered?"

forest

Quiet alpine wilderness. Pixel-art mountain vista — snow-tipped peaks at golden hour, deep evergreen forest, mirror lake. Cool blue-green base, peach accents. No banner — gentle for long sessions.

garden-rain

Ghibli-style garden rainfall. Wet stone steps, a metal bucket and a blue plastic one catching rainwater, leafy plants with blue flowers. Cool slate-blue base, plant-green cursor, no banner.

gitbash

Git Bash / MinTTY recreation. White background, near-black text, bar cursor, the classic multi-color prompt with live git-branch detection. The only light-mode theme in the catalog.

golden-forest

Warm sepia autumn. Amber and moss palette over deep dark green. Quiet — no banner, gentle for long sessions.

halo

EXT3-series LED halo portrait. Third in the EXT3 dot-matrix series alongside tombraider and marquee. Psychedelic multi-color portrait inside a circular halo ring — coral primary, gold EXT3 label, blue and lavender accents. Right-aligned on pure black, vintage CRT cursor. "Look up. Look closer."

kitty

Soft pastel CRT. Pink, lavender, mint pastels. Retro / vintage cursor, acrylic. The most playful theme in the set.

lain

Serial Experiments Lain. Lain at her Navi — tangled cables, faint red status lights, the teddy bear. Deep blackish base, lavender-pink monitor glow, vintage CRT cursor. "Present day, present time. Hahaha."

marquee

EXT3-series LED marquee. Hot magenta dot-matrix portrait, blue arm accents, gold EXT3 label. Pure black canvas, right-aligned image so text sits on the left half. Sister piece to tombraider. "Through the glass, after hours."

neon-rain

Cyberpunk rainy night. District-05 corporate tower, neon yellow sign, matrix-green displays, lone delivery truck under steady rain. Deep blue base, neon yellow cursor, matrix-green status accents. "The neon never sleeps."

rain

Contemplative highland-storm. Slate-purple stormy sky, moss-yellow accents, rust for the lone cloaked traveler. Field-journal banner. "Still no sign of the others."

snowday

Quiet winter sunset. Pixel-art creek through a snow-dusted birch grove, peach-coral light through bare branches, soft dusty mountain in the distance. Deep dusk-blue base, sunset peach cursor, no banner.

sober

Minimalist monochrome. Grayscale with one subtle teal accent, no banner, single-line prompt. The opposite of umbrella's drama.

tombraider

90s arcade marquee. LED-pixel TOMB RAIDER sign in hot neon magenta with Lara's silhouette, gold EXT3 label, cyan highlights. Pure black base, neon magenta cursor, vintage CRT cursor. "Press start."

---

Screenshots are generated by scripts/capture-screenshots.ps1 (see Adding your own style below). If they're missing or out of date, run that script from inside Windows Terminal and commit the output.

macOS, Linux, and non-PowerShell shells

TerminalStyles works outside Windows Terminal. Colors are applied as OSC escape sequences, which every current terminal understands, so tstyles eva retints the window you are sitting in immediately — and, because the choice is recorded, every tab you open afterwards too.

brew install powershell                  # if you don't have pwsh yet
pwsh
Install-PSResource -Name TerminalStyles
Import-Module TerminalStyles -DisableNameChecking
tstyles                                  # the picker, live-previewing as you arrow

Styling zsh and bash

Colors belong to the terminal, not to any one shell, so a zsh tab already picks up the palette. The prompt and banner need one extra step:

tstyles shell-init

That adds a small loader to ~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile. New zsh/bash tabs then come up in the full style — palette, window title, banner, and the style's prompt — and those shells get a tstyles command of their own:

% tstyles umbrella
% tstyles list

tstyles shell-remove takes the loader back out.

The loader reads only files that were precomputed when you applied the style, so it never starts PowerShell on shell startup, and it produces no output at all in a non-interactive shell — ssh host command, scp, and rsync are unaffected.

The PowerShell profiles also set PSReadLine syntax-highlighting colors. zsh and bash have no equivalent, so prompt.sh ports the title, banner, and prompt only.

What your terminal can show

	Colors	Cursor	Font	Opacity	Background image	Tab color
Windows Terminal	✅	✅ shape + color	✅	✅	✅ animated	✅
Terminal.app	✅	color only	—	—	✅ still, new window	—
iTerm2	✅	color only	—	—	—	—
Ghostty / WezTerm / kitty / Alacritty	✅	color only	—	—	—	—
VS Code terminal	✅	color only	—	—	—	—

Colors, including the cursor color, arrive as escape sequences and retint the window you are already in. Everything else has to be written into a config the terminal reads at startup, and TerminalStyles only knows how to write two of those: Windows Terminal's settings.json and Terminal.app's .terminal profile.

So the dashes above describe this tool, not the emulator. iTerm2 would honour a Dynamic Profile and WezTerm draws animated background images; nothing here writes either yet. They are marked — rather than ✅ on purpose — a claimed capability that no code delivers means a style reports success, paints nothing, and suppresses the notice that would have explained why.

Applying a style reports which parts the current terminal cannot show, so a plainer result is never a mystery.

Background images on Terminal.app

Colors reach your current window as escape sequences, instantly. An image cannot — Terminal.app only takes one through a profile, and a profile only applies to a new window. So a style that ships a background gives you:

tstyles eva              # colors + prompt, right here, right now
tstyles eva -NewWindow   # a new window with the background image as well

The profile is written either way, under ~/Library/Application Support/TerminalStyles/profiles/, so you can also open it from Finder or set it as your Terminal.app default.

Terminal.app renders a still background, not an animated one. The bundled backgrounds are animated GIFs, so the first frame is extracted to a PNG and used instead — Windows Terminal animates, Terminal.app shows a still. Pointing a profile at the GIF directly produces a blank background with no error.

Background image

Each bundled style has its own animated background, hosted on the gifs branch of this repo. tstyles lazy-fetches each one on first use of the style and caches it under %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\styles\<name>\, so the install ZIP stays small (~100 KB instead of ~10 MB). On Windows Terminal, picking a style auto-applies the image and the arrow keys cycle the background live alongside the colors / cursor / font. Terminal.app takes one through a generated profile, which means a new window and a still frame (see above); no other terminal gets one yet.

To override the bundled image with your own:

tstyles -BackgroundImage "C:\Users\me\Pictures\moody.gif"

To disable backgrounds for this style:

tstyles -BackgroundImage ""

Switching to a style that has no bundled image clears the previous style's background rather than leaving it showing through. A background you set — your own image, or Windows Terminal's desktopWallpaper — is never touched: only images TerminalStyles itself installed are cleared.

Requirements

• Windows 10 / 11, or macOS, or Linux
• A terminal that can render a style:
  • Windows Terminal — the full feature set, including background images
  • Terminal.app — colors, cursor color, and prompt in the current window, plus a background image in a new one (tstyles <name> -NewWindow)
  • iTerm2, Ghostty, WezTerm, kitty, Alacritty, and anything else that speaks OSC 4/10/11/12 — colors, cursor color, and prompt. Run tstyles and it reports what your terminal can and cannot show.
• Either Windows PowerShell 5.1 (ships with Windows) or PowerShell 7+ (pwsh). Both engines work. On macOS: brew install powershell.
• For the PSGallery install path (Install-PSResource), PowerShell 7.4+ ships PSResourceGet natively. Older shells can use the bootstrap iwr | iex one-liner instead — it auto-registers a loader in every PowerShell engine it finds.

Execution policy

If you see UnauthorizedAccess / "ejecución de scripts deshabilitada" on shell startup, your CurrentUser execution policy is Restricted. The installer asks to fix this for you. To do it manually:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned

(GPO-locked machine policy can override CurrentUser. If the install shows that, ask your admin or run an elevated Set-ExecutionPolicy at LocalMachine scope.)

Scriptable / non-interactive

For dotfiles managers, CI, or anything that needs a one-shot apply (no menu), there's a direct script:

pwsh -File "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\TerminalStyles\apply.ps1" -Style umbrella -Target "PowerShell" -BackgroundImage "C:\img.gif"

apply.ps1 is the same logic as the interactive picker but driven entirely by flags. It writes a timestamped settings.json.bak-<timestamp> (and a $PROFILE.bak-<timestamp> when overwriting one) before applying, keeping a full audit trail of every run. See apply.ps1 -? for the full parameter list.

Recovering from a bad direct apply

tstyles <name> and tstyles random write a rolling backup to settings.json.bak (no timestamp — overwritten on each direct apply) in the same directory as settings.json before each change. To restore the last-known-good state:

$wt = "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json"
Copy-Item "$wt.bak" $wt -Force

The picker (tstyles with no arg) doesn't write a .bak — pressing Esc reverts in-memory to the exact prior bytes. If you need a full history of changes (rather than just "undo the most recent direct apply"), use apply.ps1 instead — it keeps timestamped backups per run.

Updating

tstyles update

tstyles update detects how the module was installed and delegates:

• PSGallery (Install-PSResource) → runs Update-PSResource -Name TerminalStyles.
• Bootstrap (iwr | iex) → re-runs the bootstrap one-liner.

After update, open a new tab (or run Import-Module TerminalStyles -Force -DisableNameChecking) for the new version to take effect.

How the update check works

For bootstrap installs only, tstyles issues at most one unauthenticated HTTP GET per 24 hours per machine to api.github.com/repos/fcreme/TerminalStyles/commits/main (capped at 2 seconds), comparing the returned commit SHA against the one recorded at install time in %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\.installed-sha. The 24h throttle is tracked in %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\.last-update-check and applies even on failure. No authentication, no payload sent, no analytics.

PSGallery-installed copies skip this check entirely — Update-PSResource handles version comparison internally when you run tstyles update.

Uninstalling

tstyles uninstall

tstyles uninstall detects how the module was installed and delegates:

• PSGallery → runs Uninstall-PSResource -Name TerminalStyles + strips the Import-Module loader from your $PROFILE.
• Bootstrap → removes the install-managed files from %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\ (script files, bundled styles) and strips the loader.

Either path preserves your user state by default — your active style (current-style.ps1), update-check throttle, and cached background images stay at %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\. You can reinstall (either path) and pick up where you left off.

To also remove the user state, pass -DeleteData:

tstyles uninstall -DeleteData

Neither path modifies Windows Terminal's settings.json — your current color scheme / cursor / background stays whatever it was last set to.

If you want a clean default look back, either restore a settings.json.bak-<timestamp> file from %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\, or open WT Settings → "Open JSON file" and edit by hand.

Adding your own style

Drop a folder into %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\styles\<name>\ with:

<name>/
├── scheme.json        # Windows Terminal color scheme (required)
├── theme.json         # profile-level overrides (optional)
├── profile.ps1        # custom pwsh $PROFILE (optional)
├── background.gif     # default background image (optional, .png/.jpg also accepted)
└── README.md          # description (optional)

tstyles picks it up automatically on next module load — no registration needed. The dir is the same regardless of install path (bootstrap or PSGallery), and folders here survive updates: both tstyles update (bootstrap re-install) and Update-PSResource leave %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\ untouched.

If you drop in a folder with the same name as a bundled theme (e.g. eva/), your version wins — useful for tweaking a bundled theme's prompt or palette without forking the repo.

To contribute your theme back to the bundled catalog, see CONTRIBUTING.md — short version: code-only folder under styles/<name>/ on main, background image (if any) flat-named on the gifs branch, and the maintainer curates what gets bundled.

• scheme.json must contain a unique name. See Microsoft's docs.
• theme.json uses the literal string "{{BACKGROUND_IMAGE}}" for the background image field; tstyles substitutes the bundled background.* (or the user's -BackgroundImage flag if passed) and strips the field if neither is available.
• profile.ps1 is copied to current-style.ps1 on apply and dot-sourced from $PROFILE on shell startup.
• background.gif / .png / .jpg / .jpeg is auto-applied when the style is selected. Priority order if multiple exist: .gif > .png > .jpg > .jpeg. Only contribute images you have the right to redistribute.

After adding a new style, regenerate the screenshot gallery so your theme shows up in the README:

# Must be run from inside a Windows Terminal tab
pwsh -File .\scripts\capture-screenshots.ps1
git add docs/screenshots/
git commit -m "Refresh theme screenshots"

capture-screenshots.ps1 iterates every installed theme, applies it, takes one PNG of the WT window, then restores your original theme.

Known limitations

• One $PROFILE per host. Confirming a style with a custom prompt replaces current-style.ps1. Switching styles changes the prompt globally — there's no per-tab prompt configuration.
• Repo size grows with styles. Bundled GIFs are committed binaries; contributors should keep each under ~2 MB and only submit images they have the right to redistribute.
• Not every terminal can show every part of a style. Windows Terminal reads the whole theme.json field set from its settings.json. Everywhere else the colors are applied as OSC escape sequences, and no escape sequence carries a background image or a tab accent color. On Terminal.app the image is instead delivered through a generated .terminal profile, which means a new window (tstyles <name> -NewWindow); tab accent color has no equivalent anywhere but Windows Terminal. An apply says which parts the current terminal cannot show rather than dropping them silently. Hosts that render nothing (VS Code's integrated terminal, conhost) stay plain by design.
• zsh/bash styling covers the prompt, not the syntax highlighting. The PowerShell profiles carry a PSReadLine color block; zsh and bash have no equivalent, so prompt.sh ports the title, banner, and prompt only.
• JSON reformatting. Each apply reformats settings.json cosmetically (PowerShell's ConvertTo-Json style). Functionally identical; Windows Terminal rewrites the file on its next save anyway.
• User state lives outside the install regardless of install method: %LOCALAPPDATA%\TerminalStyles\ on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/TerminalStyles/ on macOS, $XDG_DATA_HOME/TerminalStyles/ (default ~/.local/share/) on Linux. This dir holds your active style, cached background images, the staged zsh/bash runtime, and the update-check throttle. It survives uninstall (unless you pass -DeleteData) and version upgrades.
• Bootstrap + PSGallery installs can coexist. If you've run both, whichever your $PROFILE loads first wins; the other is orphaned silently. To clean up: tstyles uninstall removes whichever is currently loaded; run it twice (switching shells between runs if needed) to clean both.

Contributing

Bug reports, feature ideas, and new themes are all welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Themes are the easiest way in: pitch one with a theme idea issue, or grab a good first issue.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.