I have been doing more with PowerShell recently. One thing that troubled me was that my color, font, and size settings were not sticky. I would get PowerShell configured just right. But when I would launch PowerShell from the cmdline or use it to debug in Visual Studio, my personal settings would be lost.

The cause is that the settings in a console session are applied to the shortcut link. The settings are not applied universally to the user profile. Suppose you start a console and click the console icon to set the font, layout, and color. These settings are saved in the shortcut that was used to launch that particular console.

To persist across sessions, you need to update the default values in your user profile. This is stored in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console.

The command prompt is under: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console\%SystemRoot%_system32_cmd.exe]

The PowerShell prompt is under: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console\%SystemRoot%_system32_WindowsPowerShell_v1.0_powershell.exe]

Here are the values:

ColorTable00 == dword storing the background color in blue, green, red.
ColorTable07 == dword storing the foreground color in blue, green, red.
FaceName == string storing the name of the font, such as “Lucida Console”.
FontFamily == dword set to 0x36 for fixed width fonts.
FontSize == dword set to 00, then the font size in hex, then 0000. For example, 10-point (0xA) font is 000A0000.
FontWeight == a dword defaulting to 0x190.
WindowSize == a dword in coord format: 2-byte height and 2-byte width. For example, 0028 0078 is 40 characters tall by 120 characters wide.
ScreenBufferSize == dword in coord format. Note the WindowSize cannot exceed the ScreenBufferSize.

I prefer a retro green screen console with large fonts and a large buffer. Here are the values from my registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console\%SystemRoot%_system32_WindowsPowerShell_v1.0_powershell.exe]
"ColorTable00"=dword:000f2000
"ColorTable07"=dword:0000f000
"FaceName"="Lucida Console"
"FontFamily"=dword:00000036
"FontSize"=dword:00100000
"FontWeight"=dword:00000190
"WindowSize"=dword:00280078
"ScreenBufferSize"=dword:012c0078