Tab background on active/hovered is dark even in light mode

[Octal450]

Windows Terminal version

1.16.10262.0

Windows build number

10.0.22621.1194

Other Software

No response

Steps to reproduce

• Open Windows terminal when the light them OR use system theme (with Windows set to light mode)

• Observe the tab row
  

• Hover over a tab while another tab is open:
  

Expected Behavior

Like in the previous version, the tabs should be light when in light mode (like Settings is)

Actual Behavior

The tabs (except for settings) are dark when in light mode.

[Octal450]

PS: I noticed that by default the application was now in "Dark" mode as opposed to "Windows default". Why? Shouldn't it track Windows' color scheme by default?

[CirnoT]

I believe this might be desired behavior. Tab color now tracks background color of selected color scheme for given profile.

Can't say I particularly agree with this choice but I also very much doubt it's gonna be reverted or changed.

[j4james]

This behavior is configurable with the new theme settings. See the documentation here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/customize-settings/themes

[Octal450]

That's rather silly... I don't understand the reasoning for such functionality at all. Especially being on by default...

[3tothe6]

This may be a bug introduced in v1.16 in which theme support was stabilized. For people who don't have time reading the doc, backup your settings.json and revert to v1.15.3465.0, then your problem may be solved.

[CirnoT]

This behavior is configurable with the new theme settings. See the documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/customize-settings/themes

It is actually impossible to redefine built-in themes as they are removed from JSON file; so "Use system theme" behavior can not be reproduced.

For those looking to reproduce old behavior; see attached theme configuration:

{
    "themes": 
    [
        {
            "name": "Dark (legacy)",
            "tab": 
            {
                "background": null,
                "unfocusedBackground": null
            },
            "window": 
            {
                "applicationTheme": "dark"
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "Light (legacy)",
            "tab": 
            {
                "background": null,
                "unfocusedBackground": null
            },
            "window": 
            {
                "applicationTheme": "light"
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "Use Windows theme (legacy)",
            "tab": 
            {
                "background": null,
                "unfocusedBackground": null
            }
        }
    ]
}

[zadjii-msft]

As noted in this thread, we introduced support for Themes in 1.16 (and further refined them in 1.17). As a part of that work, we took the opportunity to revisit what the "out-of-the-box" theme of the Terminal looks like¹. We really wanted to revisit the fact that for most users (who haven't set the OS theme), when they launch the Terminal, they get a window that's mostly black, with a white titlebar. This contrast seemed a little silly to us. So we opted to optimize for the first run experience being dark theme, a dark-gray titlebar with tabs that were seamless (effectively, black).

Of course, customizability has been one of my zealous ideals here on the Terminal, so while changing the default themes, I wanted to make sure to give folks whatever knobs they needed to make the Terminal look however they like.

The situation we probably failed to consider as deeply as we should was folks who had a light titlebar, and wanted to just use the new "light" theme out of the box. As noted in this thread - the default light theme with the default dark colorscheme creates a black terminal, with a black tab, on a white titlebar. Clearly, there's a lot of folks here who don't love this look².

I've maybe overestimated in my head how willing folks would be to change the theme settings if they didn't like the defaults. That's on me - I'm always tinkerering with my settings, but my experience is not universal. Most folks just want sane defaults. I had made a lot of assumptions and let my personal preferences get involved here, so that's my bad.

I think we should more broadly promote the "legacy" themes as authored by @CirnoT in this thread. Those are just about what the old themes looked like, so if that's what people want, I wanna give the people what they want. I'd like to leave this thread open to track ingesting those into the default list of themes. Now, that might be a bit tricky. The built-in theme names need to get localized, and I don't know if we can check in loc changes like this in a servicing release. If we can't, then they'd be first (re)-available in 1.17 Stable/1.18 Preview.

We're discussing some options as a team, but probably won't have more to share till after we discuss more on Monday³.

In the meantime, I'd recommend everyone who's missing the old themes insert that blob into their settings.json.

Thanks for all the lively feedback here!

Footnotes

1. This had already changed slightly over the last couple releases, as we were working on ingesting some of the WinUI changes for Windows 11. ↩

2. Though, I do think this is where we're getting into a discussion of UX taste - in discussion we had as a team, we generally preferred the new light theme with the seamless black tab, over the old "black terminal, white tab, light titlebar" look of the old theme. Though the white tab/light titlebar does look a lot like the vintage console... ↩

3. EDIT: some conflicts came up and our team sync is getting moved this week, though I'm not quite sure when it'll be yet. ↩