Windows Terminal Preview v0.3 Release
Kayla
Windows Terminal Preview v0.3 has been published to the Microsoft Store! If you have previously installed the Terminal from the Store, you will receive this update automatically.
If you’ve not yet installed Terminal from the Microsoft Store, now would be a great time because it contains some MAJOR improvements and updates!
⭐ If you are unable to access the Microsoft Store, you can also download the Terminal from GitHub on our Releases page! Installations from GitHub will have to be manually updated each time a new release is published.
Updated UI
Draggable Title Bar!
The Terminal is now DRAGGABLE FROM ANYWHERE ON THE TITLE BAR!!! 🎉🎉🎉
Improved Dropdown Button Layout
Additionally, the title bar now has a new look! The dropdown button has been resized as well as recolored and it now stays to the right of the last opened tab. The minimize, maximize, and close buttons have also been recolored to provide a uniform experience.
Windows Terminal v0.3
Windows Terminal v0.2
Accessibility
We have started to reintegrate some of the assistive technology we added to Windows Console back in Windows 10 1703 into the Windows Terminal.
We now expose the Terminal’s controls and contents as a User Interface Automation (UIA) tree, enabling tools like Narrator to interrogate, navigate, and read the contents of the Terminal’s UI controls and text content.
⭐ The accessibility experience is early in its implementation and has not yet undergone thorough testing, so if you encounter any bugs please file issues on GitHub.
We’re continuing to improve the Terminal’s accessibility features, so stay tuned for lots of updates in this area in coming releases.
New Settings
As we’ve continued to develop and improve the Terminal’s capabilities and features, we’ve also added more configuration options for you utilize!
Custom Tab Title
You can now define the tab title of each profile within your settings by setting the "tabTitle" property in a profile. Applying this setting will override the tab title provided by the profile’s shell. This can help distinguish between profiles and provide a more customized experience.
Additional Background Options
You are now able to add a background image on top of an acrylic background with a color tint using the properties "backgroundImage", "useAcrylic", and "background"!
Additionally, you can offset your background image so it’s not only centered using the "backgroundImageAlignment" key and values of "center", "left", "top", "right", "bottom", "topLeft", "topRight", "bottomLeft", "bottomRight":
This animation demonstrates a gif background offset to the bottom right of the Terminal with a blue tinted, acrylic background.
New Selection and Key Bindings
Selection
When using your mouse to click and drag to select text within the Terminal, you are now able to drag your mouse outside the Terminal window to continue selecting text above/below. Additionally, you can now select sections of text by double or triple clicking. The delimiters for double clicking are set in your profiles.json using the “wordDelimiters” property. Triple clicking will select the whole line!
Key Bindings
OEM keys ({}_+-=|/?<>:”;’) are now available for mapping within key bindings! Additionally, you are now able to have key bindings for copying, copying text without newline characters, pasting, and duplicating a tab! These are set in the profiles.json settings file within the “keybindings” property and are made default as of this release.
👉 Note: If you have previously installed the Terminal before this release, these key bindings will only appear by default once you delete your profiles.json and allow it to regenerate. You can save your original profiles.json elsewhere and copy over your customizations or just add these key bindings manually. We are aware this is not an ideal experience and are working to improve this.
Azure Cloud Shell Connector
You can now connect to the Azure Cloud Shell within the Terminal! Azure Cloud Shell is a browser-based command-line experience hosted in the cloud that gives you access to your files and projects stored within Azure. With this connector, you can add the Azure Cloud Shell as a profile and directly connect to Azure files through the Windows Terminal on your desktop. For details on how to use this new feature, check out Pankaj Bhojwani’s post!
Updated About Section
The About section now includes links to documents you may find useful. These links route to pages on GitHub which provide information on how to get started customizing the Terminal, how to use the Terminal, and what features have been updated with each release.
Top Community Contributors
We have received many contributions from the community on our GitHub repository and we would like to acknowledge those who have especially made an impact since our last release!
Contributors Who Opened the Most Non-Duplicate Issues
🏆 j4james
Contributors Who Created the Most Merged Pull Requests
🏆 j4james
🏆 fcharlie
Contributors Who Provided the Most Comments on Pull Requests
🏆 j4james
Feedback
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Kayla (@cinnamon_msft) and Rich (@richturn_ms) on Twitter or file an issue on our GitHub! We’ve had a great time working with all of you over the past few months and we’re looking forward to collaborating with you more!
86 comments
AH! I love this feature. I always went with secondary-bash WSL-like .exe’s but I think this one once refined will be a winner. Killer UI, I love the GNOME-ness within Windows and being able to switch from cmd to bash to zsh in a click, having various Linux-terminals installed is A+
Woah awesome can’t wait to try out some of these new features!!!
Does this new update delete my configuration file? Because I spent some time on it with the preview.
Am I able to ask what font you used in the code you provided?
Please refer to here, and the referred thread there for update.
“The Terminal is now DRAGGABLE FROM ANYWHERE ON THE TITLE BAR!!! ”
No it isn’t. It still relies on you dragging on the space to the right of the tabs. I don’t understand why this would be a feature that deserves multiple exclamation points, especially when it doesn’t work. This is the only application on any platform that I’ve ever seen behave like this in 30 years of using GUIs.
Nice to see that’s improvement but a really a better usability i like it was Linux tmux or cmdr when we can dived screen and add other above, bottom left or right screen with a key shortcut
Greate! I love these features!
I have some more suggestions. Should the terminal in the future let “\r\n” pasted convert to be “\n” automactly? Everytime I paste some text from Windows into my wsl, I find a extra white line appears between each two lines, that always bothers me, thanks
Beyond that, when I want to copy some text from my wsl in terminal, every line break is missing
Hi Kayla,
This is great news. I really like the update to being able to drag from anywhere in tool bar. I keep forgetting and it sits an ignores me. Anwyay, how do I get the update? I have v 0.2.1831.0 and if I go to the Microsoft Store, it tells me I already have the preview. Is there some secret way to get the v 0.3 update?
Nevermind. I actually read through everything and realized I could install via chocolatey. Works great.
Thanks!
“If you have previously installed the Terminal before this release, these key bindings will only appear by default once you delete your profiles.json and allow it to regenerate”
Uh… when does the profiles.json regenerate? I deleted mine and now it seems like I get an error pop-up and am stuck on default settings.
Edit: I had to delete it again. You cannot just reopen settings after deleting it, you have to close windows terminal and then reopen it. I accidentally created a blank file by trying to reopen settings right after first deleting it.
That font, any chance we’re getting it soon?
I liked the way CTRL+C worked in the old terminal: if any text was selected it would copy the selection to the clipboard, if not it would send a CTRL+C message to the application.
Is there a way to get similar behavior in the new terminal?
I’ve noticed that the new terminal so far is much slower than conhost. At least in my quick unscientific tests. Is the performance supposed to be improved further later on?
Hi, I have been using the default WSL/Ubuntu 18.04 terminal and I must say that this a huge update. Next, I have the following questions:
1) In Ubunto 18.04, how does one properly set the startingDirectory to $HOME or ~ in regards to WSL? Is there supporting documentation? It would be nice if it simply used the default directory for the user’s account as defined by Ubuntu 18.04 similar to the Ubuntu 18.04 terminal.
2) Next, I noticed that fontSize of 19 appears to be huge. Is this the correct sizing or could this be my machines resolution?
3) Is there a recommended way to export and import your terminal settings with others?
Huge congrats, wish the team all the success, and I look forward to the future updates of the Windows Terminal.
Looks great. Please tell me the background image can be specified differently for each tab? I’ve always got multiple tabs (and windows) open and having a quick way to visually distinguish them is really helpful.
*Edit* – ok looks like background image is part of each profile so I can set up a number of similar profiles just with different background images. What would be really wonderful would be the ability to change the background image and title _dynamically_ so that I can set them half way through a session to provide a visual clue to context.
I like the new look of the dropdown button, but I would give it up in a heartbeat to get back the old position.
I have already my ubuntu to wsl 2. But, I cannot add ubuntu to this windows terminal 2. Can you post a blog on how to do that?
Where can we get that Windows Logo GIF?
I’m running Windows 10 Home build 1909. After installing the application from the Windows Store, it will not launch. P.S. Does the app installation require a reboot before launching successfully? Any other suggestions?