Last year at Build 2019, we first announced the Windows Terminal. Since then, we have been working with the community to create a wonderful terminal experience while still being a preview product.
Here we are at Build 2020 and we are so excited to share with you our latest announcements!
Build 2020
Windows Terminal 1.0
We are incredibly proud to announce the release of Windows Terminal 1.0! Windows Terminal has come a long way since its
announcement at Microsoft Build 2019. You can download Windows Terminal from the
Microsoft Store or from the
GitHub releases page. Windows Terminal will have monthly updates, starting in July 2020.
Windows Terminal Preview
We are also launching a preview channel of Windows Terminal. If you are someone who likes to be involved with the development of Windows Terminal and use the latest features as soon as they are developed, this is the channel for you! You can download Windows Terminal Preview from the
Microsoft Store or from the
GitHub releases page. Windows Terminal Preview will have monthly updates, starting in June 2020.
Documentation Website
After you have installed Windows Terminal, you may want to learn how to get the most out of your new development tool. We have just launched the Windows Terminal documentation site, which provides details about all of the settings and features the terminal has to offer, as well as some tutorials to get you started on customizing your terminal. You can find all of the Windows Terminal documentation at
aka.ms/terminal-docs.
Top Features
Windows Terminal is full of features that improve your workflow and give you a wide variety of customization options to give you the best experience. Here’s an overview of some of our fan-favorite features.
Tabs and Panes
Windows Terminal allows you to run any command line application inside tabs and panes. You can create profiles for each of your command line applications and open them side-by-side for a seamless workflow. Each of your profiles can be uniquely customized to your liking. Additionally, the terminal will automatically create profiles for you if you have Windows Subsystem for Linux distributions or additional PowerShell versions installed on your machine.
GPU Accelerated Rendering
Windows Terminal utilizes the GPU to render its text. This provides a much faster experience when using the command line. This renderer also provides support for Unicode and UTF-8 characters. This gives you the opportunity to use the terminal in a variety of languages while also displaying all of your favorite emojis. 😉 Lastly, we have included our newest font, Cascadia Code, inside the Windows Terminal package. The default font is set to Cascadia Mono, which is the font variant that does not include programming ligatures. For additional variants of the Cascadia Code font, head over to the
Cascadia Code GitHub repo.
Customization Options
Windows Terminal is full of settings that provide an unlimited amount of customizations. You can have acrylic backgrounds and background images with unique color schemes and custom fonts for your own personalized experience. You can also add custom key bindings to help you feel more at home. Additionally, each profile is customizable to match the workflow you need, whether it be on Windows, WSL, or even SSH!
Fan-Favorite Community Contributions
Some of the coolest features in Windows Terminal were contributed by community members on
GitHub. The first we would like to call out is background image support.
Summon528 wrote the functionality for Windows Terminal to support both gifs and images in the background of the text window. This is by far one of our most used features.
Another fan favorite is the retro terminal effect setting.
Ironyman added support for glowing text and scan lines within the text buffer, thus providing that feeling of using a classic CRT machine. The team never anticipated this feature coming through on GitHub, but it was so good that we just had to include it inside the terminal.
Top Contributors for Windows Terminal 1.0
Windows Terminal would not be where it is now without the help of our community. We would like to acknowledge those who have made a large impact on bringing Windows Terminal to 1.0.
🏆
j4james
🏆
mkitzan
🏆
pi1024e
🏆
greg904
🏆
mcpiroman
🏆
lhecker
🏆
skyline75489
🏆
ironyman
🏆
summon528
🏆
mikemaccana
🏆
egmontkob
🏆
jsoref
🏆
german-one
🏆
dlong11
🏆 …and many more!
We have had hundreds of contributors and we wish we could list all of them above! We’d like to especially thank them for all their help and we couldn’t do it without them!
What’s Next
We are actively working on new features that will appear in the
Windows Terminal Preview release in June. If you’d like to join the fun and help contribute to Windows Terminal, there are many issues labeled “Help Wanted” on our
GitHub repo! We will shortly be publishing our roadmap for Windows Terminal 2.0 on GitHub, so be sure to keep an eye out. If you’re curious about what we’re actively working on, our milestones will give you a good idea of where we’re headed. 😊
Cheers!
We hope you enjoy
Windows Terminal 1.0 as well as our new
Windows Terminal Preview and the
aka.ms/terminal-docs site. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to Kayla Cinnamon on Twitter (
@cinnamon_msft). If you find any bugs or would like to file a feature request, please file a new issue on
GitHub. If you’d like to read more about the developer tool announcements made at Build 2020, head over to Kevin Gallo’s
blog post. We can’t wait to continue working with the community and developing new features to continue making Windows Terminal a great tool for developers!
Kayla Cinnamon
Program Manager, Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, & Cascadia Code
Changes
- Windows Terminal now ships with Cascadia Code 2005.15.
- All emoji are now sized as recommended by Unicode 13.0. You will see some emoji that are smaller than you want them to be. That's just a fact of life. (#5934)
- Documentation for Windows Terminal has moved to docs.microsoft.com!
- Existing user documentation in this repository will be moving to a nice farm upstate in short order.
It will not escape your notice that there are two packages in this release:
- WindowsTerminal is the stable build of Terminal.
- WindowsTerminalPreview is the preview version, which can be installed side-by-side with the stable version.