How to Change the Windows Terminal Default Shell Profile

The Windows Terminal is now generally available as version 1.0. I already shared a blog post on how to customize the Windows Terminal and shared my personal settings.json file with a lot of different examples, like the integration of PowerShell Remoting, SSH Remoting, changing the background image and much more. One question I got is, how to change the Windows Terminal default shell or default profile from PowerShell to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) or the command line (cmd).

By default, the Windows Terminal takes PowerShell 7 (if it is installed) as the primary shell when you open the Windows Terminal. However, if you want to change that you can simply configure the default shell in Windows Terminal, in the settings.json file. On the top, you can find the “defaultProfile” setting with a GUID

{
    "$schema": "https://aka.ms/terminal-profiles-schema",
    "defaultProfile": "{574e775e-4f2a-5b96-ac1e-a2962a402336}",
....
}

The GUID is the GUID of your profile. For example, if you want to change it to cmd, you can use the following GUID “0caa0dad-35be-5f56-a8ff-afceeeaa6101”.

Windows Terminal settings.json

I hope this blog post gives you a look on how to switch the default shell in Windows Terminal. I recommend that you check out my other blog post where I share even more details on how to customize the Windows Terminal. You can also read the full announcement blog for the version 1.0 here or check out the documentation on Microsoft Docs.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.