The Windows Terminal is the new, powerful, open source terminal application that was announced at Build 2019. Its main features include multiple tabs, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, a GPU accelerated text rendering engine, and custom themes, styles, and configurations.
It’s now available in the Microsoft Store, and while I’m not a huge command line user in Windows, it does feel like a night and day upgrade from cmd.exe. By default, it supports both cmd and PowerShell.
I like it.
By default, Powershell is a different color than cmd.exe, and both are different from the Linux shells I have installed. The two WSL installs I have are the same color, though (Debian and Ubuntu in my case). However, it is possible to give each WSL its own theme, and even different profiles for each of the WSL shells or PS or cmd.exe.
There is currently no UI to change settings – it just opens a .json file in your favorite text editor, but it’s fairly straight forward to make changes. I’m assuming a UI for settings is forthcoming, but I really hope that directly launching an editor to make changes is retained. It was simple enough to figure out how to change the default (PS is default, I changed it to cmd.exe), and to move tabs from the title bar to their own tab bar.
It is definitely preview, though. Tabs just overflow out of view with no UI to access tabs that don’t fit, and there is no way to drag a tab from one window to another. But, again, it is preview software.
Still, though, it’s pretty snazzy.
Now, if only they’d add tabs to Explorer….
Is this terminal capable enough to do vim and screen and vim in screen? Is solid Unix VT-whatever a goal of this project? I have yet to find a Windows terminal application which is glitch free for my command-line heavy usage of remote Linux machines (without firing up an X server). I would be VERY interested in one.
Yes, that’s the goal. They showed demos of vim running inside tmux inside of this. Not only that but they improved the entire Windows console ecosystem by adding support for PTYs, which (as developers adopt it) should improve the experience in programs like Visual Studio (proper and Code) for example, with benefits for other terminal emulators on Windows.
Or https://cmder.net/