Windows 10: Command Window Colors

If I open the command window and highlight something the text color comes out black and the background bright white.
How I can change them?

This not the same as the popup colors.
What are the popups anyway?

I know how change colors of text and background colors of regular text and popup text.

But not the highlight text.

Don Cole

:)

 

Windows 10 Colour Customization Absolutely Sucks

You can turn color on in the title bars as of the Windows 10 Fall update release (10586) under Settings :: Personalization :: Colors if you use the "Show color on ... title bar" option there.

You can get a wider range of colors by using the exact command line:

control color

from a Win+R (Run) prompt, but the colors are currently partially limited in order to ensure visibility.

 

How to get rid of green frame around all input fields

Hi,

To check if this is due to incorrect Window color settings, try this:

Right-click Start, click Command Prompt.

Type the following commands:

reg query "HKCU\Control Panel\Colors" >%temp%\colors.txt

reg query "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\Colors" >>%temp%\colors.txt

notepad %temp%\colors.txt

Copy the contents of the file colors.txt, and include it with your reply.

 

You should be able to change all four properties.

 

Windows does a kinda "reverse" color match on highlighted text in the console window. Not much control over that part. If you change the text color, it will pick an appropriate reverse color of it's choosing. Probably not what you wanted to hear, but. Example of changing the text to Cyan, highlight comes out Red. The background of the highlighted will always be white.

 

The highlight reverses both text and background colours in my experience.

 

The only way I found that you can change the highlighted text is if you change the cmd windows background color along with the text color. That's why Fafhrd's highlighted text is blue on yellow, his text is yellow, confused yet?

There can be many contrasting colors set to the users liking, some pleasant *Smile, some garish. *Eek As an example, a pink background with the brite green text makes my eyes hurt, some sets can make the text invisible; Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

See Part Four of my 7F tutorial. Make sure you start as in step four and click on default to set the defaults you want.

 

Thank you Edwin, f14tomcat, Fafhrd and Anak,

I've pretty much got

screen text,
screen background
popup text,
popup background,
highlight text,
and highlight background
colors down now.

What I would now like to know is what is a popup? and where could I view one?

Don Cole

 

If you press F7 it will show a command history pop up, in your chosen pop up colours, like this:





perhaps you can find some more?

 

You're welcome!

The popup or cmd line history popup is useful for re-running a previous cmd, proficient users of a cmd prompt may have hundreds of previous cmd's [the default is 50 and can be set to 999] so while in a cmd session they would invoke the F7 key and use the ↑↓ keys to pick a certain cmd and press enter to run that cmd.

Something I just learned is, you can set the opacity [transparency] of the cmd window in w10 by going to the botom of the Colors Tab and use the slider at the bottom of the tab.

More:
To change the default amount of cmd's saved, see: Part One: To Change Command Prompt Options in my tutorial.
Also: How To Make The Command Prompt Look & Work Better

 

If you happen to choose a custom colour with selected color bit values for your background and text, you get even more variation with the highlight effects:




Remember though,if you use powershell, it will format and highlight colours itself, so don't make stuff unreadable!

 

I use my theme colors, (if I think of it!) *Wink
I believe you must customize each applet though, CP, CP Admin, PS and PS Admin, I could be wrong.

 

With the mention of PS [Powershell] and how the regular prompt windows work I usually work with the elevated prompts and when I checked the regular cmd window it reflected the changes I made to the elevated one.

When I went to check PS it retained the OS defaults but when I checked the defaults they were set to my changes in the standard cmd window...*Confused... I then checked PS properties and they were defaults so I changed them to my preference and both defaults and properties of PS are holding...*Biggrin

I did find out that there is no F7 cmd history popup that I can find on my system and I have been looking for that, so far I'm only coming up with a get-history cmd and it is harder to work with. This site: https://PowerShell Command History and Buffers | www.petri.com says there should be an F7 popup for PS unless I'm using the ISE version of PS, but as far as I can tell I'm not. So my problem will be to find out why it won't on my laptop. I did go into the lenovo settings app and the keyboard is set to use the function keys as F keys and not hotkeys, F7 doesn't work on either regular or elevated PS just the standard cmd window. As for history PS won't save it but there are ways around that.

I have explored the first dozen sites in these google searches: powershell history across sessions | and | how to bring up cmd history in powershell

By the way; If you mess up the personalizations and want a quick way to revert to default see this tutorial by @Pyprohly Command Prompt - Restore Default Personalization Settings - Windows 7 Help Forums