Use the Command Prompt a lot? You don’t have to settle for Light-grey on black. In fact, you can color up your Command Prompt screen, like this!

color9f
Command Prompt, a la BIOS

Or how about this?

color0d
Light Purple on Black

Fortunately this is very easy to do. In fact, there are two ways of doing so.

First way: in console

Launch Command Prompt, then type:

COLOR [background][foreground]

Background and foreground can be one of the following HEX digits:

0 Black 8 Gray
1 Blue 9 Light Blue
2 Green A Light Green
3 Aqua B Light Aqua
4 Red C Light Red
5 Purple D Light Purple
6 Yellow E Light Yellow
7 White F Bright White

For example: you want white on yellow. Type “COLOR 6f”. 6 = background, F = foreground (text color). Another shortcut you can use, if you want to keep the background as is: typing COLOR [color] will change ONLY the text color.

If you want to reset to the default colors, type “COLOR”, by itself.

You can see more info about the command by typing “COLOR help”.

Second way: Console Window Properties

Right click on the title bar (where it says “Command Prompt”), and select Properties. Now you can change not only the color, but also the font of your cmd, size of the screen, and even customize the 16 available colors to make a color scheme that’s not so harsh on the eyes!

CmdProperties

If you want to set the color scheme as a default, Right-click the title and select Default. Everything else works the same way.

P.S. For those of you Minecraft players, you’ll notice that Minecraft’s color codes correspond very much to Command Prompt’s color codes. Go figure!

Published by Geoffrey Liu

A software engineer by trade and a classical musician at heart. Currently a software engineer at Groupon getting into iOS mobile development. Recently graduated from the University of Washington, with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Music. Web development has been my passion for many years. I am also greatly interested in UI/UX design, teaching, cooking, biking, and collecting posters.

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