profile.colorTable is broken

[DHowett-MSFT]

Setting a colorTable in a profile was broken in 8ba8f35dc5 when we set the default _schemeName to Campbell. During the construction of a TerminalSettings, we apply the table and then the scheme. If we do it in a different order, or delete _schemeName when we find colorTable, it works fine.

However: nobody noticed. This is the perfect opportunity to kill that feature or replace it with "colorTable overlays on top of the scheme"!

Related: #1069.

[mhintzke]

@DHowett-MSFT I just tried to customize my colorTable and noticed none of my changes took effect. Finally tracked down this issue. Do you know of a work around for now by any chance or are we out of luck and forced to just use a colorScheme for now?

[DHowett-MSFT]

Consensus among the team is that color schemes are better suited to this purpose: we never implemented individual color index overriding for tables overlaid on schemes, which would have been the only way to make them broadly useful.

If you don’t mind my asking, why might you prefer setting the color table in the profile over having a color scheme?

[mhintzke]

It is very possible that a scheme is what I'm after. I tried out a couple of the out-of-box ones like "One Half Dark" and "Solarized Dark", but there were minor tweaks I wanted to make as my oh-my-posh theme was causing some low contrast points for me that were hard look at. It is possible I am just not aware of how to use the Color Schemes properly.

I tried playing around with the profile.json a little, but the tooltip hints weren't enough for me to figure it out. Is there specific documentation on how to customize your own color scheme within this repository?

[mhintzke]

Ok I have found a pretty easy path towards installing a bunch more color schemes. I'm not sure if I am just missing this documentation somewhere, but for any future people that are having an issue installing their own custom scheme here is what you do:

1. From the Windows Terminal, open up Settings which will open up your profiles.json
2. Find a Windows Terminal scheme from the iTerm2 github and then find it in the Windows Terminal folder here
3. Copy the JSON in the theme you want to try and paste it into the "schemes": [] property inside the profiles.json you opened up in step 1
4. Go up in the profiles.json and find the shell profile of the one you want to change (I changed PowerShell Core) and set the "colorScheme" to the name of the scheme you just pasted on step 3.

Voila!

@DHowett please let me know if there is some other documentation I can point to that already states this information. It would be great if there were instructions on how to do this in the root level README.md of this repository, no?

[ghost]

🎉This issue was addressed in #5190, which has now been successfully released as Windows Terminal Preview v0.11.1121.0.:tada:

Handy links:

• Release Notes
• Store Download