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Windows 10 Fall Creators Update Command Colours

Alastair Grant | Friday 27 October 2017

The latest build of Windows 10 (1709) introduces further love to the Command Prompt (formally known as a DOS Prompt, but since the death of Windows ME there has been no DOS under-pinning Windows).

We've already seen the ability to maximise the window, and now the latest quality-of-life improvement is a change to the default colours.  Moving away from colours that were originally picked when everybody used low resolution CRTs to a set that are actually readable on a high-resolution TFT display.

This change comes at a critical point as we now have improved Linux on Windows support, and you can now install OpenSUSE 42.3 directly into Windows - no virtualisation required.  So when you launch the OpenSUSE application, you get a bash prompt with liberal use of the colour blue - which is really, really hard to read in a command window.

The Problem

This change is only a change to the default colours; if you already have Windows installed nothing will change.  Argh!  Who wants to blow away their profile just to update the colour scheme?

Luckily for us, the team who developed the changes have also published ColorTool that allows us to choose from a variety of colour schemes.

How to fix it

  1. Download ColorTool and unpack the Zip.
  2. Open a command window to the unpacked location
  3. Execute: colortool - d campbell

Your colours will now have updated.  There are a few other schemes included that you might want to try out at your leisure.

The only thing left now is to have a similar option in the Taskbar Settings as allowing to use PowerShell instead of CMD to also apply for a Bash shell.

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