Microsoft has released the first release candidate of Windows Terminal.

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.

The Terminal will also need to meet our goals and measures to ensure it remains fast and efficient, and doesn't consume vast amounts of memory or power.

Changes

This is the first release of Terminal whose name doesn't have "(Preview)" in it!
That doesn't necessarily mean we're done, but it does mean that this is the first release candidate.

Rendering (Performance!)

• Terminal no longer renders the entire screen when something changes (#5345) (#5185) (#5092)
  • This saves 30-40% of the time it took to print out your huge synthetic test files from #1064 and it makes cmatrix run even faster.
• RTL text should now be slightly more reliable (possibly readable! not necessarily "working" to any great degree) (thanks @schorrm!) (#5734)

Accessibility

• Narrator and NVDA should once again be able to read out search results (#5478)

Input & Interaction

• We've reworked how we handle titlebar dragging to not require us to cut a giant hole in the window (thanks @greg904!) (#5485)

Miscellaneous

• Terminal now ships with the CRT embedded, so it can be deployed in places where the Store doesn't exist (#5661)
• The terminal now has a minimum width (#5599)
  • If that width is too big for you, I'd love to learn why you want our beautiful child to be so tiny.
• You can now click "Third-Party Notices" in our About dialog to see which OSS we're using (#5508)
• cls (cmd) and Clear-Host (powershell) will now properly clear Terminal's scrollback (#5627)
  • This required some ingenuity. These two applications "clear" by printing a bunch of spaces down on top of the screen or "scrolling" the buffer to an absurd location.
  • The pseudoconsole host now detects these requests, only when they come from CMD or PowerShell, and translates them into the intended modern format of clear.
• New tab/min/max/close buttons now have tooltips (thanks @Chips1234!) (#5484)

Bug Fixes

• We fixed the bug where terminal wouldn't always scroll down to the bottom (and pretend it hadn't seen any lines below it) (#5630)
• Pasting HTML-formatted buffer contents into Outlook Web/Gmail no longer includes a stray "WINDOWS TERMINAL !!!" (#5595)
• When you request cleartype antialiasing over translucency, your text will now remain visible (#5277)
  • This comes at a performance cost. cleartype AA costs more when we have to compose it.
• For those of you who like to use Ctrl+Alt as AltGr, that works again (thanks @lhecker!) (#5552)
• The emoji picker should be better-aligned with your text (#5609)

VT & Translation

• Lines that begin with blocks of color no longer sometimes have their colors stripped (#5550)

Performance

• We now spend even less time constructing attribute runs and text render clusters (community contribution!) (#5584) (#5644) (#5645)

Reliability

• Terminal would, for some people, always crash on exit. An exit is an exit, but a crash is also a crash, and that made our reliability numbers stink. That's fixed. (#5629)
• The backing console should no longer crash when you resize it when CMD is running (#5620)
• A selection crash has been fixed (#5551)
• Some accessibility scenarios involving the alternate buffer no longer cause crashes (#5399)

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