How to enable transparent background on Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is your primary command line experience to run Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Linux on Windows 10, and it is fully customizable.

Alongside the ability to set custom themes, change the color of background or set an image as background, you can also apply an acrylic background to add transparency effects with blur and fine noise textures part of the Microsoft Fluent Design System.

In this guide, you’ll learn the steps to enable and configure the acrylic background effect on Windows Terminal on Windows 10.

How to enable acrylic background on Windows Terminal

To enable the transparent background on the terminal, use these steps:

1. Open Windows Terminal.

2. Click the menu (down-arrow) button next to a tab.

3. Click the Settings option.

   Quick tip: It’s recommended to use the Visual Studio Code to open the settings, because it includes the JSON schema which will make it easier to change the settings.

4. Under the “defaults” section, copy and paste the following command to enable transparency in all command line apps:

   "useAcrylic": true, 
   "acrylicOpacity": 0.5

   

5. Under the list section, select the profile (app) to set the acrylic background. For example, under "commandline": "powershell.exe" insert a comma (,) at the end of the line, and copy and paste the following lines:

   "useAcrylic": true, 
   "acrylicOpacity": 0.5
   

   

6. (Optional) In the acrylicOpacity settings change the value of select the transparency level. For example, 0.6 will make the background less transparent, and 0.4 will make the background more transparent.

7. Save the file to apply the changes.

Once you complete the steps, you can start using the Windows Terminal with an acrylic background for a specific app or all the command line apps depending on your configuration.