Appearance

Everything here is under Settings → Appearance or Settings → Terminal, and applies the moment it changes. The Appearance page has a Preview drawn with the real palette and the real font, so you can see a theme or a font before you look back at the terminal.

Themes

Settings → Appearance → Theme → Color theme, or type “theme” in the command palette. The theme applies to every window, the terminal palette and Termina’s own dialogs. A profile can have a theme of its own, which then wins in its panes. Four themes are built in, and any number can be imported.

• The Editora themes’ ANSI colors come from Editora’s editor themes. Each color takes a role from the matching syntax palette: red is a keyword, green an escape, yellow a type, magenta a function, and cyan is the Caret teal. A shell’s ls colors stay in the same family as the editor’s code colors.
• On Editora Light, ANSI white is drawn dark. A program that sets color 7 on a white background would otherwise write invisible text. For the same reason its yellow is a dark amber. Termina’s tests check the contrast of every color in both Editora themes.
• The Clear themes were decoded from Apple’s own .terminal profiles, not matched by eye. Apple ships them translucent over a blurred desktop; Termina draws them opaque.
• Clear Light is low-contrast in four places, as Apple made it: white, bright yellow, bright cyan and bright white against its white background. This is kept on purpose, because a port that changes its source is no longer that theme. If a program writes in one of those colors, choose Editora Light.
• The Clear themes borrow the Editora control styling of the same brightness for the Settings window and dialogs.

Importing a theme

Settings → Appearance → Theme → Import a theme → Import… reads a color scheme another terminal wrote:

These are the formats the iTerm2-Color-Schemes collection publishes every scheme in. A file is recognized by its contents where its extension does not say, and only the color keys are read, so a whole configuration file can be imported and its fonts and key bindings are ignored.

• Colors are taken exactly as the file has them, the cursor and selection colors included where the file names them. Nothing is adjusted for contrast. The Settings window and the dialogs take the Editora styling that matches the theme’s background.
• The new theme is selected, and listed after the built-in four, in Settings and in the palette. The row says what was imported, or why a file was not.
• Importing a file again replaces the theme of that name rather than adding a second copy.
• Remove deletes the imported theme chosen above it, and the color theme goes back to Editora Dark. The built-in four cannot be removed.
• Each is a plain file in ~/.termina/themes, named after the theme in lower case with hyphens between the words (solarized-dark.properties), that you can read and edit.

Font and size

Settings → Appearance → Font:

• Font family. The five bundled families come first: JetBrains Mono (the default), Cascadia Code, Fira Code, IBM Plex Mono and Source Code Pro. Every monospace face installed on the machine follows. Bundled fonts look the same on every platform. Proportional faces are not offered, because the renderer places every glyph on a fixed grid of cells.
• Font size, 7 to 40 (13 by default).

Zoom is separate from the size. Zoom In Ctrl+= (Cmd+=), Zoom Out Ctrl+- (Cmd+-) and Actual Size Ctrl+0 (Cmd+0) step through a browser’s ladder from 30% to 300% of the size you set, which stays as it is. On Linux and Windows the View menu shows zoom as one row, Zoom − 100% + ⤢, which stays open while you press it; the percentage resets it, and the last button is Full Screen. The right-click menu has the same row on every platform. On macOS the View menu lists Zoom In, Zoom Out, Actual Size and Full Screen as ordinary items.

Wide characters (CJK, emoji) take two cells. Fira Code is bundled, but ligatures are not drawn.

Icons

File-type icons from eza --icons, lsd or a prompt theme are Nerd Font characters, and they draw with no Nerd Font installed: Symbols Nerd Font Mono 3.5.1 is bundled with the other faces.

• Which face draws an icon. When the terminal font is itself a Nerd Font, its own icons are used. Otherwise the Nerd Font build of the terminal’s face if one is installed (JetBrainsMono Nerd Font beside JetBrains Mono), and failing that the bundled one.
• The bundled face’s icons are a cell and a half wide, the size the Nerd Font builds draw theirs, so they spill into the space after them, as a listing is laid out to expect, and they are centered on the row.
• Powerline separators span the line, so a prompt’s segments meet.
• It is not in the font picker. It has icons and no letters.

See also Troubleshooting.

The interface font is Inter, bundled.

A profile’s own font and theme

Settings → Profiles gives every profile, the Default Shell and the discovered ones included, a Font, a Font size and a Theme of its own. Each is Default until set, which follows the global setting.

• They follow the pane. A split, a duplicated tab, a reopened tab and a pane moved to another tab keep the look of the profile they were opened as.
• The size goes through zoom. Zooming applies to every pane alike, whatever size its profile sets.
• With several themes in one window, the window’s own colors, behind the panes, the window buttons and the tab marks, follow the pane being typed in.

See Shell profiles.

Cursor, padding and bell

Settings → Terminal → Display:

• Cursor shape: Block (the default), Underline or Bar. A program can still ask for its own shape while it runs (vim does); when it resets the terminal, your choice comes back. A block cursor shows the character under it.
• Only the pane that takes your keys has a solid cursor. In the other panes, and in a window that is not focused, a block cursor is drawn as an outline and a bar or underline is dimmed, so you can see where your typing will go before you type.
• Padding, 4 pixels by default and up to 32: the space between the text and the edges of the pane. It applies at once, to every pane.
• Visual bell (on by default) flashes the screen when a program rings the bell. There is no audible bell. A bell in a background tab also marks that tab, whether or not the flash is on.
• Desktop notifications (on by default) let a program’s notification reach the desktop when you are not looking at its pane. Its tab is marked either way. See What programs can ask for.

The window

Settings → Appearance → Window:

• Show the menu bar (on by default). Hiding it keeps every command on its chord, and the right-click menu has Show Menu Bar to bring it back. View → Hide Menu Bar is Ctrl+Shift+M. Not offered on macOS, where the menus are in the screen menu bar.
• Put the menu bar in the title bar (off by default). One row holds the menus at the left, the window title in the middle and the window buttons at the right, and the terminal gains the row the system title bar took. The platform keeps its own window buttons, and the empty part of the row and the title drag the window. It applies to windows opened after the change. It is not offered on macOS, nor on a platform that cannot draw its own title bar. In full screen the title and the window buttons go away, and the menus, if shown, stay as an ordinary row.
• Show a scrollbar (on by default). It takes a column of width so that it never covers text, uses the terminal palette’s colors, and hides itself on the alternate screen, where a full-screen program owns the view. The wheel scrolls the scrollback either way.
• Window opacity, 60% to 100%. Plain transparency, with no blur, so the text fades along with the background. It applies to terminal windows only, and stops at 60% so that a window never becomes too faint to undo it.

Settings → Appearance → Tabs → Hide the tab bar with a single tab (on by default). The row is given to the terminal, and the shell gains a line. The strip comes back with the second tab.

Window size and position are remembered, and pulled back onto a screen that still exists.

Language

Settings → Appearance → Language → Interface language: Automatic (the default), English, Italiano, Español, Français, Português or Deutsch. Automatic follows the operating system, and uses English when the system’s language is not one of the six. A string missing from a translation shows in English. The change takes effect after a restart.

The settings sidebar

The Settings window’s sidebar has two groups, General (Appearance, Terminal, Profiles, Keyboard) and System (Sync, Advanced). Each page has an icon: a palette for Appearance, a prompt window for Terminal, stacked layers for Profiles, a keyboard for Keyboard, two arrows chasing each other for Sync and sliders for Advanced. The icons are muted until their page is selected, then take the accent color. See Settings.