Windows Terminal Preview 1909 released with new features

Windows Terminal a new terminal app for command-line users that has plenty of new features including tabs, a GPU accelerated DirectWrite/DirectX-based text rendering engine, profiles, and more. A new version of the app changes the version number format. Now it is using the Windows version syntax, so here's the September 2019 release (1909).

Windows Terminal is fully open-sourced. Thanks to the new tabbed console, it allows organizing instances of Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux together in a single app.

The app comes with an icon that reminds of new Office and OneDrive icons, reflecting Microsoft's modern design view known as 'Fluent Design'.

Microsoft is releasing a new version of Windows Terminal via the Microsoft Store. The key changes of Windows Terminal Preview 1909 include.

Cascadia Code

Cascadia Code is the new monospaced font developed alongside the Terminal. Cascadia Code version 1909.16 is packaged inside this version of the Terminal and will automatically install on download. You can also download it from its GitHub releases page. Cascadia Code is open source and Microsoft are welcoming all contributions.

Settings Schema

The Terminal now has a settings schema. The settings schema will provide auto-fill suggestions when editing your profiles.json file and it will also provide definitions of each property. Reference to this schema is automatically included in this release, so you can give it a try.

Stylus Selection Support

You can now use a stylus to make a selection inside the Terminal. The Terminal treats the stylus like a mouse and will always select text when dragging over the Terminal window.

CloseWindow Functionality

"closeWindow" is a new key binding option for the Terminal. When invoked, it will close your window and if you have multiple tabs open, it will show you a warning/prompt before exiting. It’ll be bound to Alt+F4 by default.

Note: This functionality does not yet exist when clicking the close button. This is only invoked when using the key binding. Clicking the close button will close all of your tabs without displaying a warning message.

Clipboard Copy Bug Fixes

This version fixes a bug which was introduced in Terminal v0.4 where it would sometimes crash when copying. Now, if something fails to be added to the clipboard, the Terminal won’t crash. Additionally, copying text from the Terminal will now respect newline characters.

20H1 Bug Extermination

The team behind the Windows Terminal are the same team that is working on the original conhost that ships within Windows. They are fixing bugs within conhost that will be shipping in Windows 20H1. Some of the bug fixes include:

• When copying text with HTML tags (<>), they are now rendered properly.
• Properly copying the background color when using HTML copy.
• More robustly handling scrolling regions and attributes from VT applications.
• General code health and conhost reliability improvements.

Release Cycle and v1.0 Roadmap

Microsoft has shared the following roadmap for the app.

We are happy to share with you the release cycle we plan to maintain for the Windows Terminal. Our regular release cadence will be once every four weeks. These four weeks include two weeks of feature development, one week of quality and stability work, and one week of release preparation.

We plan to have v1.0 of the Terminal feature complete by the end of 2019. From there, we plan to take a few months to fix bugs, improve quality, and ensure stability. We are aiming to release Windows Terminal v1.0 in April 2020. In addition to the roadmap, we have full documentation of all of the features planned for v1.0 on GitHub.

Grab the app here:

Windows Terminal on Microsoft Store