Windows Command Line
Windows Terminal, Console and Command Line, Windows Subsystem for Linux, WSL, Windows Package Manager
Latest posts
Windows Package Manager 1.3
Today I get to announce Windows Package Manager 1.3 has been released. The team has been adding several enhancements to manifests to improve your package installation experience. We’ve enabled better package version reporting. A new setting allows verbose logs to be on by default. If you run the system architecture is now displayed. The progress bar was improved with more fine-grained blocks. And the Windows Package Manager now supports portable applications. Manifest Improvements Display Documentation Some packages include documentation associated with a package version. You will now be able to see the doc...
Windows Terminal Preview 1.15 Release
Welcome back to another Windows Terminal release! This release updates Windows Terminal to version 1.14 and includes all of the features from this previous blog post. Additionally, Windows Terminal Preview is getting an update to version 1.15 and will include all the features detailed here. As always, you can install Windows Terminal and Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. Now, let's get into the good stuff! This release is dedicated to all the Marks out there. 😉 Keyboard selection (mark mode) You can now use your keyboard to select any text in the text buffer wit...
WSL 2 distros are now supported on Windows Server
WSL 2 distros are now supported on Windows Server You can now use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 type distros on Windows Server 2022! We’re excited to make this change so that now you can have the same modern WSL experience whether you use a Windows with Server or Desktop SKU. How to start using it We first talked about this change on Github when this update was made available to folks who wanted to use it early, and now this is part of our latest update to Windows Server. To get it, all you need to do is click “Check for Updates” on your Windows Server machine to update to the latest version and you’ll...
Windows Terminal Preview 1.14 Release
It's Microsoft Build! We have a Windows Terminal Preview release for you focused on fixing bugs and improving quality. This release also migrates Windows Terminal to version 1.13, which contains the new features defined in this previous blog post. As always, you can install Windows Terminal Preview and Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. Let's dive into what's new. ❗The minimum supported version of Windows 10 for Windows Terminal 1.13+ has been increased from 18362 (19H1) to 19041 (20H1). Experimental background image for window Have you wanted to have your panes split o...
Windows Package Manager 1.2
We've been busy improving the Windows Package Manager. Today I have the pleasure of announcing the availability of Windows Package Manager 1.2. It has been released to the Microsoft Store as an automatic update to the "App Installer" this morning if you're running Windows 10 (1809+) or Windows 11. ARM64 Support We've been working to improve the experience for users on ARM64 devices like the Surface Pro X, the Lenovo X13s, or the Samsung Galaxy Book Go. The Windows Package Manager chooses the best available package based on your hardware architecture. If a native option is not available, the next best option w...
Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 Release
Welcome to the first Windows Terminal release of 2022! This release will add the new features below to Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 and migrate Windows Terminal to version 1.12, which includes all of the features from this previous blog post. The Windows Terminal 1.12 build will be released through the Windows Insider Program before being delivered to retail versions of Windows. As always, you can install Windows Terminal and Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub repository. ❗The minimum supported version of Windows 10 for Windows Terminal 1.13+ has been increased from 18362 (19H1...
Windows Wednesday
Hey everyone! We have an exciting new web show planned to launch next year called Windows Wednesday that we'd love to tell you more about. 🙂 What is Windows Wednesday? Windows Wednesday is a weekly 30-minute live web show where we'll talk about anything related to Windows. We'll invite subject matter experts to talk about their tools and features, deliver live demos, and help answer any questions you may have! Some topics we'll be covering include Windows Terminal, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Windows Sounds, PowerToys, and Fonts, just to name a few. We would love to invite those of you who have products or t...
Windows Terminal as your Default Command Line Experience
Hey Windows Terminal fans! This month we are delivering a servicing release and the next feature release is scheduled for January, so we figured we'd write a blog post discussing Windows Terminal as the default command line experience on Windows and what our future plans are. What is a default terminal? A default terminal is the terminal emulator that launches by default when opening a command line application. Starting from the dawn of Windows, the default terminal emulator has always been the Windows Console Host, conhost.exe. This means that shells such as Command Prompt and PowerShell have always opened ins...
Connecting USB devices to WSL
I’m a software engineer building tooling for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code to support C++ embedded device development. These physical devices typically connect to a computer over USB, but we discovered we couldn’t use WSL to test our tools on Linux because it does not support USB. We weren’t alone — support for connecting physical USB devices to WSL is highly requested by the community as well. While this functionality is still not natively available in WSL, I’m excited to announce that our summer intern, Nelson Daniel Troncoso Aldas, contributed changes to the open-source usbipd-win project to enable com...