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!
Looks great 😀
plakatfar
It would be much appreciated if had an option like “focus follows mouse”, I’m switching from Terminator (with some Xvnc adaptations) to run my cli on WT and I really miss that feature…
I love this tool simply for the ability to combine multiple command shell icons on my taskbar and for the customizations of course. One suggestion, probably not the right place so feel free to coach me - with all the recent attention and effort being put forth by Microsoft to support developers using Python, and it's various tools, how about adding Python as one of the default dynamic shells? I was able to figure out...
As much as I appreciate a lot the effort that you guys take in enhancing the old bad experience terminal experience. As example you guys fixed the long-ass buffer problem that the old terminal had and the customization. However,I believe you guys can improve on adding a option to set the default terminal as this terminal as when I open a console window from the right click menu I don't want to use the old...
This is such amazing information.
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.
Edited to remove advertising links. Appreciate comments / questions etc. but please don’t use blog comments as a way of advertising products/services.
To your point: Windows Terminal is dependent on features (e.g. XAML Islands) which are not yet available on Windows Server. I have asked the Terminal team to document the current and future considerations w.r.t. Terminal on Windows Server.
My organization is still on Windows 10 build 10.0.17763. The latest release is not compatible with that lower build. What options do I have to install and use Terminal?
Nice work
Press alt+t to close the current terminal tab
{ "command": "closeTab", "keys": "alt+t" }For sure you can change keys.
Love the retro features – hopefully it enhances legibility? I was experimenting with an extension in VS Code that added a glow effect to text, and that did indeed help with my ability to read my code. 😆
If I’m not mistaken, you’re using oh-my-posh. If so, thank you!