Change the colors in the Windows 10 Command Prompt

In this article, we will see how you can customize font color and background color in Command Prompt in Windows 10.

Command Prompt is a built-in Windows operating system tool that is available from its first release. It allows the user to use the classic DOS commands as well as the Win32 console commands and applications. This is a powerful and extremely useful tool for advanced Windows users. While Microsoft emphasizes PowerShell in the latest versions of Windows 10, the old good cmd.exe application is still widely used in the operating system.

There is a trick that will allow you to change the background color and font color in the command line. This can be done permanently with a simple registry "tease" or completely temporarily with a command in the command prompt itself. Let's see how you can permanently change these colors through the registry, and keep in mind that this trick works on all older versions of Windows starting with Windows NT 4.0.

To permanently change the colors in the Windows 10 Command Prompt, do the following.
1. Open Registry Editor. If you do not know how, then press the Win + R keys at the same time, and in the pop-up window that appears, write the word regedit and press the OK button.
2. Go to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Command Processor
3. On the right, double-click the "DefaultColor" value. If not, create it as a new 32-bit DWORD (even if you are running 64-bit Windows, you will still need to create a 32-bit DWORD value).
4. The DefaultColor hexadecimal value specifies the colors of the background and font in the command line window. Its value must be in hexadecimals and include two color codes, the first for the background and the second for the font, respectively.

For example, an 04 data value will set a black background in red.

The color code is as follows:
0 black
1 blue
2 green
3 cyan (cyan)
4 red
5 Magenta
6 yellow / brown
7 white
8 gray
9 bright blue
A bright green
B bright blue
C bright red
D bright magenta
It's bright yellow
F white

5. Make the change to the color code as desired, press the OK key, and then simply close the registry editor. Changes will be saved automatically.

To temporarily change the colors of cmd.exe, do the following.

Open the command line and type the following command:
color color_of_color_color (no space between the two color codes)
Use the same color codes as above. For example, to set a white background color in blue letters, issue the command: color F1
The result will be as follows: