{"id":533,"date":"2026-10-01T11:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T18:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/aspire\/?p=533"},"modified":"2026-10-01T11:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T18:12:09","slug":"aspire-terminal-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/aspire\/aspire-terminal-support\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing rich terminal experiences to Aspire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Think back to the first code that you ever wrote. For a significant majority of developers that first code was probably a “hello, world” program written in your language of choice.<\/p>\n

After that there is a pretty good chance that you modified that same program to prompt for a name and change the message to “hello, {world}”. For me my very next program was a number guessing game where I guessed a number between 1 and 100. Simple programs that teach some input concepts around input, output, variables, and data types.<\/p>\n

The tools that you would have used for these relatively simple programs included some kind of text editor, a compiler or interpreter, and a terminal emulator<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If not terminal emulator, why not terminal emulator shaped?<\/h2>\n

Despite the general utility of terminal emulators, Aspire itself was not capable of rendering the output of programs in a fully featured terminal emulation experience. The console logs view would allow you to see standard error and standard output streams from your terminal program and provided some limited inline coloring.<\/p>\n

That isn’t to say that the console logs view in the Aspire dashboard isn’t useful. It is – if you just need to throw some text on the screen, it’s probably the best option. However, if you need more complete escape sequence processing, or your program needs an interactive terminal, then the new terminal features in Aspire are for you!<\/p>\n

Introducing WithTerminal\/withTerminal<\/h2>\n

With the release of Aspire 13.5, we introduced a new API that allows developers to attach a terminal emulator to their resources. The usage pattern is very simple:<\/p>\n

<\/i>Experimental<\/strong><\/p>The terminal APIs and aspire terminal<\/code> commands described in this post are experimental. Their APIs and behavior may change in a future release.<\/div><\/p>\n

\/\/ TypeScript\nvar repl = await builder.addExecutable(\"noderepl\", \"node\", \".\", [])\n                        .withTerminal();<\/code><\/pre>\n
A terminal emulator can be attached to projects, executables, and containers. When the WithTerminal(...)<\/code>\/withTerminal()<\/code> extension method is applied, a special annotation is added to the resource in the app model, telling DCP to launch that program with a pseudo-terminal.<\/p>\n
In the dashboard, if you navigate to where you would normally find console logs, you will find that the view is now an interactive terminal experience by default.<\/p>\n
\"Interactive<\/p>\n
The emulator has the typical options you would find along the bottom of the screen, including font sizing and dimensions, along with a button to snap the dimensions to fit the current window size. We also have the ability to detach the terminal from the dashboard, which can be useful when you want to navigate around the rest of the dashboard while still being able to interact with the terminal.<\/p>\n
One of the interesting things that Aspire supports for these resource-bound terminal experiences is the ability to have two or more views pointed to the same PTY, both interactable and kept in sync.<\/p>\n
\"Dual<\/p>\n
This can be useful if you have a multi-workspace environment and you switch between workspaces but want to be able to have the terminal visible on all of them. One of the consequences of this capability is that if I open a detached window and resize it the terminal embedded in the dashboard will resize to match although the size of the font will scale to make maximum use of the vertical or horizontal space available.<\/p>\n
We have tried to make the terminal experience as capable as possible. You should be able to run some of the more exotic terminal programs within the Aspire terminal if you choose to. For example, it should have no problem with tmux or any number of the terminal-based coding agents (useful if, as part of your product, you ship skills and want to test their behavior).<\/p>\n
In fact – the Aspire terminal has support for the Kitty Graphics Protocol and Sixels. Here are a few cute little examples:<\/p>\n