Back on the PC side of things…the pandemic recently gave me the opportunity to “attend” the Microsoft Build event, an annual programming conference that’s usually held in person but this year was a virtual thing. It was super cool, and I learned about some current and upcoming programming tools–but what I liked best was learning about a few fun Windows 10 add-ons.
The one I want to highlight here is called Windows Terminal. It’s a customizable terminal application that can serve as a more full-featured (and prettier) replacement for the standard Windows command line program. Windows Terminal lets you have multiple tabs open, featuring different kinds of command terminals (like a regular command prompt, or a PowerShell, or other command-line interfaces), and customize how each one looks and operates.
For example, here’s the default PowerShell interface:
And here’s the Windows command prompt interface, after I customized it with a retro font and colors:
The screen shot isn’t doing justice to this…in person it looks properly pixelated like a vintage monitor would!
Part of the appeal of my retro settings is the use of a modern font that recreates a classic font look. The above font is PxPlus IBM VGA8, which I got from the Oldschool PC Font Resource (“home of the world’s biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles”).
Here’s another sample of these classic fonts…
Oh, in addition to customizing the colors and fonts, you can use a background image. Even an animated gif. Indeed, even a collection of animated gifs…
