Windows 11 Terminal: Tabs, Profiles, Admin and Shortcuts

Windows 11 Terminal is the app that opens when you choose Terminal from the Start button’s right-click menu. It is not a shell itself but a modern window for the shells you already have: PowerShell, Command Prompt, Linux distributions running in WSL, and others, each in its own tab or side-by-side pane. This guide covers opening it (including as administrator), choosing which shell opens by default, the shortcuts worth learning, and where its settings live.

The steps apply to Windows 11 version 24H2, 25H2 and 26H2. Windows Terminal updates through the Microsoft Store, so minor menu details can shift between releases.

What Windows Terminal is

Microsoft describes Windows Terminal as a modern host application for command-line shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell and bash via WSL. Its main features are multiple tabs, panes, Unicode and UTF-8 support, GPU-accelerated text rendering, and themes and shortcuts you can customise.

The terms get mixed up, so briefly:

Term	What it is	Example
Shell	The program that runs your commands	PowerShell, Command Prompt (cmd), bash
Terminal	The window that hosts shells	Windows Terminal
Profile	A saved set of settings for one shell in Terminal	“Windows PowerShell”, “Command Prompt”, “Ubuntu”

Open Windows Terminal (and as administrator)

• Start menu shortcut: right-click Start or press Windows key + X, then select Terminal.
• As administrator: from the same menu, select Terminal (Admin) and approve the User Account Control prompt. Use this only for commands that need it, such as SFC /scannow or DISM /RestoreHealth.
• From a folder: in File Explorer, right-click inside a folder and select Open in Terminal to start in that folder.
• From Run: press Windows key + R, type wt and press Enter.

For single commands that need administrator rights, Sudo for Windows is an alternative to keeping a separate admin window open.

Profiles: PowerShell, Command Prompt and Linux

When Windows Terminal starts, it opens your default profile, which is PowerShell unless you change it. To open a different shell, select the down arrow next to the + button and choose a profile.

Microsoft notes that Terminal creates profiles automatically for WSL distributions and extra PowerShell versions you install, so after setting up WSL2 on Windows 11 an Ubuntu profile appears without any work. You can add your own profiles with + Add new in Settings.

To change which shell opens first:

1. Select the down arrow and choose Settings (or press Ctrl+,).
2. Under Startup, set Default profile.
3. Select Save.

Set Windows Terminal as the default terminal app

When a console program starts (for example, a script you double-click), Windows decides which window hosts it. To make that always Windows Terminal:

1. Open Terminal Settings.
2. Under Startup, set Default terminal application to Windows Terminal.
3. Select Save.

Microsoft says this feature is available in all versions of Windows 11. The same choice also appears in Windows Settings: Microsoft’s documentation of the Advanced settings page lists a Terminal option to choose the default terminal app. In Windows 11 version 25H2 and later that is under Settings > System > Advanced; on 24H2 it is on the For developers page.

Tabs and panes: the shortcuts worth learning

All of these are documented defaults on Microsoft Learn:

Action	Shortcut
New tab (default profile)	Ctrl+Shift+T
Switch tabs	Ctrl+Tab
Copy selected text	Ctrl+Shift+C
Split pane vertically	Alt+Shift+plus
Split pane horizontally	Alt+Shift+minus
Duplicate current profile into a new pane	Alt+Shift+D
Move between panes	Alt+arrow keys
Resize the focused pane	Alt+Shift+arrow keys
Close the focused pane (or tab)	Ctrl+Shift+W
Command palette	Ctrl+Shift+P

The command palette is the easiest way to discover everything else: press Ctrl+Shift+P and type what you want, such as “split” or “zoom”. You can also drag a tab out of the window to make a new window, or drop it into another window. Our Windows 11 keyboard shortcuts list covers shortcuts outside Terminal.

Open a ready-made layout with wt

Windows Terminal also accepts command line arguments, which is handy if you open the same set of shells every day. Microsoft’s overview gives this example, run from PowerShell, which opens one window with Command Prompt on the left and the right side split between Windows PowerShell and WSL:

wt -p "Command Prompt" `; split-pane -p "Windows PowerShell" `; split-pane -H wsl.exe

Save a line like this as a shortcut on the desktop or taskbar and your usual layout opens in one click. The -p option picks a profile by name, so it must match the profile names in your Settings exactly.

Customise the look and behaviour

Most settings are in the Settings window: colour schemes, fonts, font size, background images, starting folder for each profile, and keyboard shortcuts under Actions. If you prefer to edit settings as text, hold Shift while selecting Settings in the dropdown menu to open the settings.json file in your default text editor. Holding Alt instead opens defaults.json, which is generated automatically and where changes are ignored.

A good habit before editing settings.json is to copy it somewhere safe; a typo can stop your changes loading until you fix it.

Install, update or repair Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal ships with Windows 11 and is updated through the Microsoft Store: open the Store, select Library > Get updates, as covered in our Microsoft Store guide. Microsoft notes that if you install it from the GitHub releases page instead, it does not update automatically.

If Terminal will not open, update it from the Store first. If it still fails, repair or reset it in Settings > Apps > Installed apps > Windows Terminal > Advanced options. As a fallback, you can still run Command Prompt or PowerShell directly from Start search while you fix it.

For more power-user tools, see Task Manager in Windows 11 and the Windows 11 features guide.

Terminal is also where you run winget in Windows 11 to install and update apps by command.