A new preview version of Windows Terminal is now available for testing.

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.

Features

• URL auto-detection is here! Terminal will now detect URLs (of a certain limited vocabulary) and let you launch them by holding down Ctrl and clicking (#7691)
  • When we first authored this feature, we forgot to account for double-width glyphs. @comzyh made sure we didn't make this colossal (double-width) mistake (thanks!) (#8124)
• The tab switcher is now more flexible: you can use it in Most-Recently Used (MRU) order, in tabstrip order, or not at all (#8076)
  • There's a new global setting, tabSwitcherMode, which supports the following enumerated values:
    • mru - most-recently used (MRU) order (default)
    • inOrder - in-order order (the order that the tabs at the top of the window are already in)
    • disabled - do not use the tab switcher
  • This setting supersedes (but does not invalidate) useTabSwitcher (boolean)
• You can now zoom a split pane to be the only pane visible in its tab using the togglePaneZoom action (#6989) (#7973)
• launchMode has been taught about focus and maximizedFocus, which will allow you to start up in focus mode (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#7873)
  • (you can now launch directly to focus/max focus mode with wt -f and wt -Mf. wt -F continues to indicate a request for "fullscreen" mode)
• The openTabRenamer action is now available. It does roughly what it says (thanks @Coridyn!) (#7462)
• The scrollUp and scrollDown actions have learned about rowsToScroll (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#7924)
• backgroundImage now supports desktopWallpaper, which will make Terminal use your desktop wallpaper (thanks @bennetnicholas!) (#7849)
• Terminal now supports the BEL sequence (thanks @j4james!) (#7679)
  • Belling can be configured with the profile setting bellStyle (enum, audible/none) (#7793)

Changes

• The tab switcher now defaults to Most-Recently Used (MRU) order (#7952)
• While you're using the tab switcher, you can now actually see the tab you'll be switching to! (#7796)
• We will now warn you if the keyboard service is disabled (#8095), because that makes it impossible to type into Terminal
• Double-middle-clicking on the taskbar preview will now close Terminal, even if it is asking you if you really are sure (thanks @rhorber!) (#7871)
• We will now inform you, using a tooltip, that holding Alt while selecting a profile opens a new pane (#7866)
• The hyperlink underline is now far less obtrusive than it was before (#8148)
• The "Open Windows Terminal Here" shell extension will now use WT's icon (#8068)
• Pane actions are now animated! You can disable these animations with the global setting disableAnimations (boolean, default false) (#7364)
• Right-clicking on a tab will now yield a Close... submenu with some fun stuff in it (thanks @mpela81!) (#7728) (#7961)
• Our glyph measurements are now up-to-date as of Unicode 13 (#8035)
• You can now use emoji and Segoe MDL2 Assets glyphs as icons for profiles (and not just commands) (#7830)
• Terminal will now display the correct icon for the system's contrast mode and whether it's a preview build or not (#7971)

Command Palette

• The command palette now uses > to indicate action mode and (nothing) to indicate command mode (#7935)
  • To get from Action to Command mode, press backspace to delete the leading >.
• The substring match in the command palette will now be highlighted in bold (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#7977) (#8188) (#8168)
• PgUp/PgDown and Home/End now work more reasonably in the command palette (thanks @Hegunumo!) (#7835) with a bugfix from @Don-Vito (#8190)
• We've added a back button to the command palette that will appear when you're looking at a nested command (thanks @Hegunumo!) (#8051)

VT support

• OSC 10/11/12 now have support for the 600+ X.Org color names (like "antique white" and "lemon chiffon") (thanks @skyline75489!) (#7578) (#7929)
• We've refactored our VT parser to make it far easier to maintain (thanks @j4james!) (#7799)
• Terminal (and console) now supports DECREQTPARM (thanks @j4james!) (#7939)

Code Hygiene

• We've removed some dead code pertaining to Telnet support and shrunk our binary by a few hundred kilobytes (#7840)
• We have hooked up some more robust error reporting so we can help diagnose crashes more quickly (#7864)
• We've done some deep refactoring on the settings model (#7667)
  • All overridden settings are now available to the app (in preparation for the Settings UI in #1564) (#7923)
  • Hidden profiles are no longer deleted, which means you can use one as your default profile (#8070)
• All of the images in our repository have been optimized, which should save a couple tens of kilobytes on disk (thanks @WSLUser!) (#8169)

Bug Fixes

• Keyboard keys that are not generated by actual keyboards (hi AutoHotKey and PowerToys) will no longer be ignored (thanks @lhecker!) (#7900)
• The tab color picker should no longer get stuck if you enter #000000 (thanks @alannt777!) (#7963)
  • Bonus: you can now more easily set the brightness!
• The top border should no longer disappear when you're in focus mode (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#8140)
• PrintScreen should no longer clear your text selection (which was an entirely silly thing for it to do) (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#7883)
• We will no longer force all your terminal windows to activate when you save your settings file (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#7887)
• alwaysOnTop actually works now. Yeah, I know how that sounds. (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#8125)
• It should be more difficult to get floating context menus when you drag the window (thanks @mpela81!) (#8010)
• Resizing the window should no longer cause us to recycle hyperlink IDs (#8074)
• Failure to write to your settings file is no longer considered fatal (#7950)
• Some of you reported that clicking on links made Terminal hang! You may be surprised to find that that was not our intent. We've fixed that. (#8087)
• Key bindings will now consume dead keys, which means that you can now bind them to do more important things (as in #5784) (thanks @lhecker!) (#7686)
• We've improved the contrast ratio of the shortcut text in the command palette (#7937)
• The jump list will now display profile icons even if they have forward slashes in them (#7711)
• The Azure Cloud Shell connector will no longer fail and blame you for some sort of "Key not found" if you have an old shell configuration (thanks @Don-Vito!) (#8197)
• Accessibility: we should no longer crash when a screen reader or UIA client expands a text range at the end of the buffer (#7677) (#7792) or when it moves back to a previous word sometimes (#7770) or when it's scrolled into view (#7868)
• Accessibility: out-of-bounds text should no longer cause a crash (thanks @codeofdusk!) (#8052)

VT fixes

• The unfortunate combination of OSC 52 (the mechanism used by tmux et al. to set the clipboard) and high Unicode should no longer result in utterly garbled text (thanks @amaya382!) (#7870)
• Empty cells covered by an app-defined hyperlink will now no longer be ignored when rendering (#7738)
• App-defined hyperlinks with the same ID but different URLs are now actually considered to be different links (#7940)

Performance

• Opening and closing tabs when you have far too many profiles should no longer send the Terminal out for a coffee break (#7993)
• Launching Terminal with embarrassingly many profiles should only take about half as long now, as we'll populate the jumplist more conservatively (#7978)
• Accessibility: moving to the next word using a screen reader should be much faster (#7789)

Changes to the WPF Control

• The WPF control now supports AutoFill, which allows the control container to resize without resizing the terminal itself (#7853) (#7983) (#7892)
  • (including a margin-related bugfix from @ScriptKat!) (#8039)

Windows Terminal Preview v1.5.3142.0