Windows Terminal is a multi-tabbed

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote term ...

developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

for

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

and later as a replacement for

Windows Console Windows Console is a GUI application for running console applications in Windows. Windows Console is used for running text-based programs such as operating system shells (e.g. Command Prompt and PowerShell), utilities (e.g. Far Manager) an ...

. It can run any command-line app in a separate tab. It is preconfigured to run

Command Prompt A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...

PowerShell PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a langu ...

, WSL and Azure Cloud Shell Connector, and can also connect to SSH by manually configuring a profile. Windows Terminal comes with its own rendering back-end; starting with version 1.11 on

Windows 11 Windows 11 is a version of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released on October 5, 2021, as the successor to Windows 10 (2015). It is available as a free upgrade for devices running Windows 10 that meet the #System requirements, Windo ...

, command-line apps can run using this newer back-end instead of the old Windows Console. Since Windows 11 22H2 and Windows Terminal 1.15, Windows Terminal replaces

as the default.

History

Windows Terminal was announced at Microsoft's Build 2019 developer conference in May 2019 as a modern alternative for

, and Windows Terminal's source code first appeared on GitHub on May 3, 2019. The first preview release was version 0.2, which appeared on July 10, 2019. The first stable version of the project (version 1.0) was on May 19, 2020, at which point, Microsoft started releasing preview versions as the Windows Terminal Preview app, which could be installed side-by-side with the stable version.

Features

Terminal is a command-line front-end. It can run multiple command-line apps, including text-based shells in a multi-tabbed window. It has out-of-the-box support for

, and Bash on

Windows Subsystem for Linux Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a component of Microsoft Windows that allows the use of a GNU/Linux environment from within Windows, foregoing the overhead of a virtual machine and being an alternative to dual booting. The WSL command-lin ...

(WSL). It can natively connect to

Azure Cloud Shell Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...

. Terminal augments the text-based command experience by providing support for: * Notebook tabs, to hold multiple instances in a single window * ANSI VT sequence support *

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

and

UTF-16 UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding that supports all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode. The encoding is variable-length as code points are encoded with one or two ''code units''. UTF-16 arose from an earli ...

(including CJK ideograms and

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

s) * Hardware-accelerated text rendering via

DirectWrite DirectWrite is a text layout and glyph rendering API by Microsoft. It was designed to replace GDI/GDI+ and Uniscribe for screen-oriented rendering and was first shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Wi ...

* Modern font and font feature support (see below) *

24-bit color Color depth, also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to a pixel, the concept can be defined as bit ...

* Window transparency effects * Themes, background images and tab color settings * Different window modes (e.g. fullscreen mode, focus mode, always on top mode) * Split panes * Command palette * Jump list support * Microsoft Narrator compatibility via a User Interface Automation (UIA) tree * Support for embedded

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...

s * Copying text to

clipboard A clipboard is a thin, rigid writing board with a clip at the top for holding paper in place. A clipboard is typically used to support paper with one hand while writing on it with the other, especially when other writing surfaces are not avail ...

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

and RTF format * Mouse input * Customizable key bindings * Incremental search * Terminal shortcut * Sixel support

Cascadia Code

Cascadia Code is a purpose-built

monospaced font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with Typeface#Proportion, variable-width fonts, where t ...

by Aaron Bell of Saja Typeworks for the new command-line interface. It includes programming ligatures and was designed to enhance the look and feel of Windows Terminal, terminal applications and text editors such as

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...

and

Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code, commonly referred to as VS Code, is an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code comp ...

.Cascadia Code , Windows Command Line Tools For Developers
/ref> The font is open-source under the

SIL Open Font License The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products. OFL is a free and open source license. It was created by SIL Global, the ...

and available on GitHub. It is bundled with Windows Terminal since version 0.5.2762.0.

Notes

References

External links

Introductory post
*
Windows Terminal overview
{{Windows commands Free terminal emulators Windows commands Windows components Microsoft free software Free software programmed in C++ Software using the MIT license 2019 software Windows-only free software