I use the Windows Terminal since it was first released and I like it very much. Last August version 1.3 was released and it added the command palette, similar to the command palette that can be found in VS Code. Nice feature but the only reason I would use that is to open a new tab with a specific profile. But that was a bit cumbersome, but thankfully you can fix this yourself.

It bugged me quite some time that it was not possible to press Ctrl+Shift+P, start typing a part of the profile name and press Enter to open a new tab with that profile. So I searched the issues on GitHub, but couldn’t find any issue about this. When I opened an issue on GitHub to suggest this, I got the answer that the current behavior was by design, but that you can change this. All you need to do is to add some objects to the settings.json to do the magic for you.

Press Ctrl+, to open the setting.json and locate the actions section. If you have an older version of the settings, this section might be called keybindings. I suggest to rename that section to actions because that is the new name.

In the actions section, add these lines.

{
	"iterateOn": "profiles",
	"icon": "${profile.icon}",
	"name": "${profile.name}: New tab",
	"command": {
		"action": "newTab",
		"profile": "${profile.name}"
	}
},
{
	"iterateOn": "profiles",
	"icon": "${profile.icon}",
	"name": "${profile.name}: Split vertically",
	"command": {
		"action": "splitPane",
		"split": "vertical",
		"profile": "${profile.name}"
	}
},
{
	"iterateOn": "profiles",
	"icon": "${profile.icon}",
	"name": "${profile.name}: Split horizontally",
	"command": {
		"action": "splitPane",
		"split": "horizontal",
		"profile": "${profile.name}"
	}
}

As you can see per block, it iterates all the profile and add an entry to the list of available commands. There are three blocks, to open a a new tab and to split vertically and horizontally. Splitting horizontally I often use to build an Angular site on WSL2 on top and a pane below that running the C# API in a VS2019 Developers CMD.

Now when you press Ctrl+Shift+P all the profiles are iterated into the Command Palette. Type a few characters of the name of the profile you want to open. Three entries per profile should show up, one to open a new tab and two to split either horizontally or vertically.

With this adjustment to the settings, the Command Palette of the Windows Terminal finally has become something I actually use.

Update March 2024:
This adjustment needs to done by editing settings.json yourself. Back in the day there was no UI for the settings and Ctrl+, opened the settings.json. Now you need to press Ctrl+Shift+, to open that file in the your default JSON-editor.