Settings UI Rejuvenation

[carlos-zamora]

Note

If you have arrived here by way of a news site or blog post and wish to comment, please ensure that you are following the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct and keeping discussion threads focused on the topic of our new Settings design.

@cdobrzynski_microsoft and @carlos-zamora have been working together over the past few months to redesign the settings UI. We've done some user research testing to get some initial feedback. Now we're looking to get some feedback from the GitHub community!

These are mocks for getting the "feel" of our rejuvenated settings UI. The mockups are presented below with some notes from our user research sessions. There's some open questions there so feedback on those would be very appreciated. 😊 Hope y'all like it!

Mock-ups with more notes

Overall

• Positive feedback on having settings be a separate window
• Reduce top-level navigation entries. See below for how we're planning to reduce them.
• Novice users appreciate body text in relation to headlines (the text underneath the setting names). Experienced users didn't mind it.
• auto-save is expected as the modern default
  • however, some users want reassurance (indicator, preview, undo safety)
• live previews and visible changes increase confidence
• a canary so that we can detect blog posts about this plan written using LLMs

Startup

• The main thing here is the groupings: "Launch behavior" and "System & input defaults"
• Convert toggle button on right side to check boxes on left side (i.e. "Launch on machine startup")
• When a profile is shown in the combo box, we'll still show the icon.
• Whoops! "New instance behavior" shows "PowerShell". That should show the ones we have today.

Interaction

• new groupings: "Clipboard and paste behavior", "Text selection & editing", "Window and layout behavior"
• Convert toggle button on right side to check boxes on left side (i.e. "automatically copy selection to clipboard")

Personalization

• new groupings: "Visual style", "Tabs and Layout"
• Convert toggle button on right side to check boxes on left side (i.e. "automatically copy selection to clipboard")
• "Personalization" sets expectations (themes, fonts, visuals) that aren't met.
  • This is still a fairly open question. Some ideas:
    1. move some stuff from (Defaults) Profiles > Appearance here.
    2. Link (Defaults) Profiles > Appearance here to direct people to the right place?
    3. Change name to something that is more clearly referring to the app's appearance (vs the profile's appearance)

Compatibility

• new groupings: "Compatibility" and "Rendering"
  • the idea is to consolidate the two separate pages that exist today
• "reset to defaults" is a strong safety net
• "Compatibility" feels advanced/vague/intimidating. What's something else we can name it?

Actions

• Update styling for showing the associated key chords
• Update styling for each action to be a "setting container" kind of wrapper
• How to display/handle multiple key chords on the same action?
  • the current mockup shows a few options:
    • "View all key bindings"
    • show a single key chord
    • show a single key chord and a "..." button that will show you all of the key chords (CURRENT FAVORITE)
• "Actions" causes hesitation. "Shortcuts" would be better

Actions > Edit Action

• add setting containers
• new groupings: "key bindings" and "additional customizations"
• Actions > Edit Action worked well
• Users tend to not rename their actions. Might be worth moving down.

Dropdown Menu

• rename from "new tab menu" to "dropdown menu"
  • "Dropdown menu" is intuitive and well understood
• Move preview to right side (tested well in user research)

Profiles page

• Add navigator for "Defaults", "Color schemes", and individual profiles
  • removes them from top-level elements in the navigation view
• dynamic profiles are consistently valued
• "Defaults" (with regards to profiles) is widely misunderstood. Generally interpreted as initial terminal setup. What's something else we can name it?
• Experienced users want reuse, ordering, and duplication for the new profile page
• "profile" is interpreted as a user account
• "Color Schemes" in "Profiles" page wasn't noticed. Users want it in "Personalization"

Profile base page

• new groupings: " profile", "Visual/UI Affordance"
• replace toggle switches with checkboxes

Profile > Appearance subpage

• new groupings: "Typography settings"
• Dropdown menu preview was a strong success because now you can always see the preview. How can this be achieved with the Profiles > Appearance preview?

[cay7man]

Add "Recently modified" category

[DHowett]

Would that be:

1. Settings the user has recently modified (so that you know what you just did), or
2. settings that the Terminal team has recently added (so that you know what's new)

[abmprottoy]

While I don't oppose the idea, and this is clearly a nitpicking, but isn't Toggles are common across WinUI Settings UI pages? Converting all toggles to checkbox/selection looks like going back to WPF or WinForms design (Personal Opinion). Also, in the case of Personalization section, it seems the "Pane Animations" has no verb at the beginning, like "Show Pane Animation" that would fit the checkbox pattern. Pane Animations with a toggle previously would read as "Pane Animations On" or "Pane Animations Off" which makes good sense.

[j4james]

Yeah, I also didn't want to nitpick, but I had the same thoughts about the checkboxes. It's not a big deal, but one of the nice things about the winui toggles is that all your interaction occurs on the same side of the page. If you're clicking a toggle option, and then following that up with a change to a text field or dropdown, you're just moving the mouse up and down - it doesn't also require a movement across the full width of the page.

[SameerJS6]

Exactly, I agree toggle/switch suits better than the checkmark, I don't see any point in using checkmarks over toggle/switch components for toggling settings.

[abmprottoy]

2026-04-09.05-24-17.mp4

Another slightly off-topic but related. Terminal Settings uses a "Drill In" transition for settings pages, while every other WinUI apps including System Settings uses the Default page transition, which is "Entrance". It's just a little thing, but every time I open Terminal Settings it feels like something is off.

Here are the official Design Guidelines for Page transitions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/motion/page-transitions

[DHowett]

Thank you. This discussion pertains only to the user interface we offer for controlling Terminal's settings, and not to Terminal's other features. Please remain on topic.

[DHowett]

Not to imply that full RTL language support is something we do not care about; we just need to maintain a clean discussion area :)

[SameerJS6]

Can we please use a semantically correct color for this "Reset" button, red instead of the same color as the "Clear" button? Reset is a far more serious action than Clear, and it should be represented with a color that reflects that instead of the normal primary.

[Kenya-West]

The work is surprisingly good at UX, I have to note that! Very good job.

My only request is to keep Mica and Acrylic transparency feature as is.

Microsoft Edge did the same, they removed all the system transparency materials recently. Is it a trend?

[MattBDev]

I really liked being able to access settings in a tab in the normal Terminal window. I'm not a fan of having a separate window for it but I do understand it and I'm probably in the minority. However, I hope that if the settings window is open and you only have one tab open in Terminal and go close the Terminal app, it doesn't nag you that you left the settings window open.

[mdtauk]

The Actions page feels quite heavy with the accent coloured Keyboard Shortcut keys, looking like regular buttons. With Files we opted for a lighter weight styling for these...

Something like this may be a good middle ground...

Because these are mock-ups, I assume the titlebar styling and icon size, etc would be made standardised and so will fit in with the standard control.

An option between displaying Settings as a tab, and as its own window would be useful, I am a fan of either, because sometimes you only need a small console window, but settings being much denser would require always resizing where as a separate window would remember its size and placement.

The Dropdown Menu screen feels very unpolished. With Files we are implementing this kind of UI right now, and whilst ours is in its own dialog window, I think the list of actions on one side, and the configured chosen actions on the right, can be improved.

We allow dragging to order the items.