Windows Terminal Preview 1.2 Release
Welcome to another release of Windows Terminal! This release promotes the Windows Terminal Preview version 1.1 into Windows Terminal.
Windows Terminal Preview has new features for version 1.2 which will appear in Windows Terminal in August. You can download Windows Terminal Preview and Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. Let’s dive into what’s new!
Focus mode
There is a new feature called focus mode that hides the tabs and title bar. This mode will only display the terminal content. To enable focus mode, you can add a key binding for toggleFocusMode in your settings.json file.
This command is not bound by default.
{ "command": "toggleFocusMode", "keys": "shift+f11" }
Always on top mode
In addition to focus mode, you can enable Windows Terminal Preview to always be the topmost window. This can be done with the alwaysOnTop global setting as well as a key binding using the toggleAlwaysOnTop command.
These are not bound by default.
// Global setting
"alwaysOnTop": true
// Key binding
{ "command": "toggleAlwaysOnTop", "keys": "alt+shift+tab" }
New commands
New key binding commands have been added to give you more flexibility when interacting with your terminal.
Set tab color
You can set the color of your focused tab with the setTabColor command. This command uses the color property to define which color you’d like, which accepts a color in hex format, i.e. #rgb or #rrggbb.
This command is not bound by default.
{ "command": { "action": "setTabColor", "color": "#ffffff" }, "keys": "ctrl+a" }
Open tab color picker
A new command has been added that allows you to open the tab color picker menu. This can be done with the openTabColorPicker command. If you want to color a tab with your mouse, you can right click on the tab to access the color picker.
This command is not bound by default.
{ "command": "openTabColorPicker", "keys": "ctrl+b" }
Rename tab
You can rename the focused tab with the renameTab command (thanks ggadget6!). You can also right click or double click on the tab to rename it.
This command is not bound by default.
{ "command": { "action": "renameTab", "title": "Foo" }, "keys": "ctrl+c" }
Toggle retro terminal effects
You can toggle the retro terminal effects that add scanlines and a glow to the text with the toggleRetroEffect command. This enables the experimental.retroTerminalEffect profile setting.
This command is not bound by default.
{ "command": "toggleRetroEffect", "keys": "ctrl+d" }
Cascadia Code font weights
Cascadia Code now has font weights! You can enable these font weights in Windows Terminal Preview by using the fontWeight profile setting. A huge shoutout goes to our font designer Aaron Bell for making this happen!
"fontWeight": "light"
Command palette update
The command palette is almost complete! We are currently ironing out a few more bugs, but if you’d like to play with it, you can add the commandPalette command to your key bindings and invoke it using your keyboard. If you find any bugs, please file them on the GitHub repo!
This command is not bound by default.
{ "command": "commandPalette", "keys": "ctrl+shift+p" }
Settings UI design
We have been actively working on the settings UI and have narrowed down on a design. The design is pictured below and the spec can be found here. We appreciate all feedback and we’ll be starting implementation very soon!
Miscellaneous
⭐ You can now use nt, sp, and ft as command line arguments for new tab, split pane, and focus tab, respectively.
⭐ We now have proper logos for high contrast mode (thanks jtippet!).
⭐ There are now warnings for pasting large amounts of text and text with multiple lines. More information on disabling these warnings can be found on the global settings docs page (thanks greg904!).
Bug fixes
🐛 You can now run wt as an Administrator from the Run dialog with Ctrl+Shift+Enter.
🐛 Printing large amounts of text in WSL is 20% faster!
🐛 The terminal will no longer scroll to the bottom when there is output if you are scrolled up or have a selection.
🐛 The pseudoconsole will now forward colors and styles emitted by applications with higher fidelity, thus greatly improving color representation (thanks j4james!).
👉 Note: If you’re seeing unexpected black bars when you use PowerShell, visit the troubleshooting page on our docs site.
Top contributors
We had a ton of great contributions this month and we would like to recognize those who have made an impact!
Contributors who opened the most non-duplicate issues
🏆 j4james
🏆 trajano
🏆 musm
🏆 jtippet
Contributors who created the most merged pull requests
🏆 j4james
🏆 jtippet
🏆 lhecker
Contributors who provided the most comments on pull requests
🏆 greg904
🏆 lhecker
Until next time
For full documentation on all Windows Terminal settings, you can visit our docs site. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to Kayla (@cinnamon_msft) on Twitter. For any bug reports or feature requests, please file an issue on GitHub. We hope you like our latest updates and we’ll see you at the next one!
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25 comments
It looks great! Thank you for all the hard work you’ve put into this. I’ve been championing Terminal over Cmder at work. I’ve gotten at least one convert 😁
Kayla, I really like the terminal‘s ability to start multiple tabs/panes with different locations via command line. it is really great pain relief as I don’t need to change between my devconsoles throughout the day as I work on multiple projects. Switching tabs does’t harm my focus as much as ALT+Tab.
I do however use several Windows Server 2019 boxes.
Would really appreciate if some terminal love went that way. Maybe it doesn’t need more than a blog post, but it seems the Windows Store dependency is not something easily satisfiable on Server SKU.
Any news on a properties GUI.
I wanted to change to have black text on a white background ( the one true color choice!! )
After 3 hours of reading misleading and incorrect documentation about badly documented JSON proerpties I gave up.
In comparison Ubuntu terminal takes a minute and even CMD promt has a trivial to use GUI.
Maybe I’m an idiot but I’ve not found a terminal that is as hard to configure after using terminals for 30 year.
As Kayla describes above, the settings UI is currently under active design and development: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-preview-1-2-release/#settings-ui-design
If you’d like to review/contribute to that work, please follow the links.
In the meantime, if you’d prefer a light background and dark text, then you could choose one of the included light themes (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/customize-settings/color-schemes#one-half-light) or create your own.
The setting UI will not end up replacing the json file right?
No – it sits atop the JSON file
Care to share the background image please? It looks beautiful!
This actually is phenomenal 🙂 It is going from strength to strength! Loving all the cool new features! Keep up the good work!
I would love to see some Azure Stack Hub integration with WT to almost “simulate” Azure Shell behaviour, but it would be as persistent profile or maybe a docker container or something like that… food for thought 😉
Happy Azure Stacking 😉
Kayla, the new features are awesome. Especially command palette update is great, thank you!
And can I ask you something from screenshots? 🙂 Can you share your PowerShell prompt function with Git branch info? It uses posh-git, I believe, but I can’t reproduce your implementation. Please! 🙏🙂👍
You’re looking for oh-my-posh: https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh
Thank you so much! 🙏
How can I set up PowerSheel to be default console on startup?
You can set your default profile in Terminal’s settings.json.
Woah, this look amazing! Thanks for making it happen!
If I’m not mistaken, you’re using oh-my-posh. If so, thank you!