Windows Terminal is a modern, feature-rich command line experience, combining the best elements from PowerShell, Command Prompt, and other shells and tools into one comprehensive experience. Featuring multiple tabs and panes with GPU accelerated text rendering capabilities and customizable themes, styles, and configuration settings – Windows Terminal delivers all this and more for its users!
Windows Terminal settings are controlled through the Settings dashboard, including options to set a launch mode, keyboard shortcuts and other interaction settings.
Features
One of the key features of Windows Terminal is its user-customizability feature, enabling you to tailor its interface according to your individual tastes. Choose font styles, colors, backgrounds and transparency levels – truly making the program your own! Plus you can add keyboard shortcuts.
Windows Terminal’s capabilities for splitting tabs is another useful feature that comes in handy when working with multiple programs at once. You can do so through either its command palette, hotkeys or right-click menu. Furthermore, its active window or pane can also be resized – another handy feature.
This app boasts several other features designed to increase productivity and ease of use, such as autocopying text to the clipboard using keyboard shortcut (ctrl+shift+c). Furthermore, you can set whether or not it runs as administrator and choose its default startup directory; plus it supports Unicode and UTF-8 characters so that emojis are also displayed correctly.
The open-source community has made numerous improvements and features available in Windows Terminal, such as support for emojis and retro effects as well as a tab switcher that displays all open tabs vertically with keyboard or mouse navigation; additionally it can be configured to display them using MRU or InOrder order.
Support for multiple tabs
One of the greatest features of Windows Terminal is tab support, enabling you to open multiple Command Prompt windows simultaneously in the app. New tabs can be created using either the + icon or File > New Prompt Window from File menu – though technically this creates new tabs rather than actual windows! You can use keyboard shortcuts or custom combinations of keys (ctrl+shift+t is typically the default shortcut, though you can change this as needed) to navigate between tabs; for example ctrl+shift+t can also change between tabs but these can also be changed for other uses if preferred!
Splitting one tab into multiple panes to display different shell environments is also possible, for instance running both PowerShell and command prompt sessions in one tab, or using tmux to divide an Ubuntu tab into multiple panes with apps like midnight commander and htop running within them.
Multiple tab support is now available in Windows Terminal’s preview release and also hosted on GitHub for your convenience if you wish to modify its code yourself or make any necessary modifications.
As this is still an early preview, expect bugs and quirks. Microsoft is working on developing a more stable version that will become the default Command Prompt application on Windows machines; for now you may wish to try ConEmu, which provides similar functionality with similar free features as Windows Terminal.
GPU-accelerated text rendering
The Windows Terminal application now boasts an advanced GPU accelerated text rendering engine capable of rendering Unicode and UTF-8 characters such as emojis with greater ease than its previous GDI engine could do, providing an excellent user experience and supporting modern operating system fonts and glyphs.
Terminal provides users with many customization features to tailor the experience, such as font styles, color themes and background. Users can create multiple profiles for different shells and apps – this feature makes running multiple command line applications side-by-side much simpler – while saving profile settings can save your settings for future use.
Microsoft’s latest release of Windows Terminal is a modern shell designed to replace legacy console hosts by providing an integrated experience across Command Prompt, PowerShell and Linux commands (via WSL). The Terminal provides various advantages over its predecessor such as multiple tabs, full Unicode support and GPU-accelerated text rendering; you can even launch CMD or PSShell or Ubuntu from WSL! Plus it comes equipped with customizable themes, styles and configurations – perfect for today’s modern user!
This application is free to download, with a 30-day trial period that supports ARM64, x64 and i386 systems. You can get it from either Microsoft Store or GitHub releases page; though note that installing through either source won’t provide automatic updates.
Customization
Windows Terminal can be customized to create a more tailored experience. From customizing its background image, adding multiple panes, running different shells at once and changing font size, color and cursor shape – there are countless settings and tweaks you can do with Windows Terminal that make your experience unique and productive. There have also been open-source contributions that help make this powerful tool more productive.
Users often customize profile settings. You can quickly and easily change your default profiles for Windows PowerShell, Command Prompt, Azure Shell or Ubuntu by selecting their appropriate option in the drop-down menu on the left side of your window.
Additionally, you can modify the starting directory for a particular profile by navigating there and hitting the Select Folder button at the bottom of the window. Furthermore, you can configure font face/color and cursor shape settings accordingly in your custom profile.
Windows Terminal is one of the few applications that supports transparency effects, which you can enable by visiting your operating system’s settings and activating them. Furthermore, this terminal supports acrylic material effects through a setting called acrylicOpacity that accepts percentage values between 0-1; other customizable features include setting a default background image across all profiles or key bindings to launch it.