Yesterday, at the Microsoft Build 2019, the team at Microsoft announced Windows Terminal, a new terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like PowerShell, Command Prompt, and WSL. This terminal will be delivered via the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 and will be regularly updated.

Key features of Windows Terminal

Multiple tabs

Windows Terminal comes with multiple tab support so users will now be able to open any number of tabs, each connected to a command-line shell or app of their choice. E.g. PowerShell, Ubuntu on WSL, Command Prompt, a Raspberry Pi via SSH, etc.

Text

Windows terminal uses a GPU accelerated DirectWrite/DirectX-based text rendering engine so that it displays text characters, glyphs, and symbols present within fonts on the PC. In addition, it also includes emoji, powerline symbols, CJK ideograms, icons, programming ligatures, etc. It can also render text much faster as compared to the previously used engines. Users now have the option of using their own new font.

Settings and configurability

Windows Terminal comes with many settings and configuration options that manage Terminal’s appearance and each of the shells/profiles that users open as new tabs. The settings are stored in a structured text file so that it makes it easy for users and/or tools to configure. With the terminal’s configuration mechanism, users will be able to create multiple “profiles” for each shell/app/tool. And these profiles can have their own combination of color themes, font styles and sizes, background blur/transparency levels, etc so that users can now create their own custom-styled Terminal.

Windows Console

The team further announced that they are open sourcing Windows Console which hosts the command-line infrastructure in Windows and provides the traditional Console UX. The primary goal of the console is preserving backward compatibility with existing command-line tools, scripts, etc.

To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post.

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