Windows Terminal
This is the preview build of the Windows Terminal, which contains the latest features as they are developed. The Windows Terminal is a modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL. Its major features include multiple tabs, panes, Unicode and UTF-8-character support, a GPU accelerated text rendering engine, and custom themes, styles, and configurations.
Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users. It includes many of the features most frequently requested by the Windows command-line community including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming & styling, and more.
The Terminal will also need to meet our goals and measures to ensure it remains fast and efficient and doesn’t consume vast amounts of memory or power.
Updated settings UI design
Auto-elevate profiles
A new profile setting has been added called elevate that allows you to automatically launch a profile as elevated (as Administrator). When set to true and you are using an unelevated window, opening this profile will open an elevated window containing that profile. Otherwise, when set to false, this profile will open in the current window regardless of elevation. You can also hold Ctrl and click a profile in your dropdown to open it as Administrator.
Additionally, they added the elevated argument to the new-tab and split-pane actions, allowing you to launch a new profile as elevated using an action.
Examples to enable this feature:
// Profile setting
"elevate": true
// New tab action
{ "command": { "action": "newTab", "elevate": true }, "keys": "ctrl+shift+1" }
// Split pane action
{ "command": { "action": "splitPane", "split": "auto", "elevate": true }, "keys": "alt+shift+e" }
New rendering engine
They dded a new profile setting, experimental.useAtlasEngine, that when set to true will enable a new text rendering engine. While the performance improvements aren’t noticeable, they can be seen in certain edge cases, most notably when presenting text with a large number of colors. In these cases, this new renderer will draw at the display refresh rate regardless of screen resolution.
Installing and running Windows Terminal
Note: Windows Terminal requires Windows 10 2004 (build 19041) or later
Microsoft Store [Recommended]
Install the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store. This allows you to always be on the latest version when we release new builds with automatic upgrades.
Other installation methods
Via GitHub
For users who are unable to install Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store, released builds can be manually downloaded from this repository’s Releases page.
Download the Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_<versionNumber>.msixbundle file from the Assets section. To install the app, you can simply double-click on the .msixbundle file, and the app installer should automatically run. If that fails for any reason, you can try the following command at a PowerShell prompt:
# NOTE: If you are using PowerShell 7+, please run
# Import-Module Appx -UseWindowsPowerShell
# before using Add-AppxPackage.
Add-AppxPackage Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_<versionNumber>.msixbundle
Note: If you install Terminal manually:
- Terminal will not auto-update when new builds are released so you will need to regularly install the latest Terminal release to receive all the latest fixes and improvements!
Via Windows Package Manager CLI (aka winget)
winget users can download and install the latest Terminal release by installing the Microsoft.WindowsTerminal package:
winget install --id=Microsoft.WindowsTerminal -e
Reference:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/panes
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
