Option 3 presented the optimum balance of the least surprise to users on the default settings, with the most aesthetically pleasing results. In the default setup, this will result in the terminal appearing as white text on a black background, with a dark titlebar. 3) Change the default theme of Windows Terminal to Dark, regardless of OS theme. In the default setup, this will result in the terminal appearing as black text on a white background.

2) Default the color scheme of the terminal to match the OS theme and leave the app theme set to 'system'. In the default setup, the result is a visually unappealing contrast between black terminal content with a light titlebar. The goal of aligning Windows Terminal appearance with the colors of the Windows operating system (OS) titlebar leaves these options: 1) Do nothing (This is the Terminal default before v1.16). Many users won't change the appearance themes and will just see the default themes. Windows Terminal appearance color scheme, however, is Dark by default. The system theme in Windows 11 defaults to the Light theme appearance unless changed by the user. Any terminal can run any command-line client application, so Windows Terminal can run any shell you prefer, such as Bash using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The same thing happens for PowerShell, the system creates a new conhost window for any client not already connected to a terminal of some kind. On Windows, if you run cmd.exe, the operating system will create an instance of conhost.exe as the 'terminal' for displaying the cmd.exe command-line client. On the other hand, 'terminal' applications, like Windows Terminal, gnome-terminal, xterm, iterm2, or hyper, are all graphical applications that can be used to render the output of command-line clients, customizing things like font, text size, colors, etc. They are also sometimes referred to as 'command-line client' applications. These are text-only applications that provide streams of characters and don't care about how they are rendered to the user.

Examples of 'shell' applications include cmd.exe (the traditional Windows Command Prompt), powershell, or zsh. Windows Terminal is basically a host that enables you to run multiple command-line apps or shells side-by-side in customizable environment using tabs or window panes.

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