Yeah, finally a decent terminal on Windows! Microsoft is currently working on Windows Terminal, a new terminal / console application for all command line addicts.
In short, Windows Terminal will have the following features:
– multiple tabs:
You will now be able to open any number of tabs, each connected to a command-line shell or app of your choice, e.g. Command Prompt, PowerShell, Ubuntu on WSL, a Raspberry Pi via SSH, etc.
– GPU acceleration with a Direct2D-based text rendering engine for beautiful texts:
The Windows Terminal uses a GPU accelerated DirectWrite/DirectX-based text rendering engine. This new text rendering engine will display text characters, glyphs, and symbols present within fonts on your PC, including CJK ideograms, emoji, powerline symbols, icons, programming ligatures, etc. This engine also renders text much faster than the previous Console’s GDI engine!
– Settings and configurability:
Windows Terminal provides many settings and configuration options that give you a great deal of control over the Terminal’s appearance and each of the shells/profiles that you can open as new tabs. Settings are stored in a structured text file making it easy for users and/or tools to configure.
Using Terminal’s configuration mechanism, you will be able to create multiple “profiles” for each shell/app/tool you want to use, whether it be PowerShell, Command Prompt, Ubuntu, or even SSH connections to Azure or IoT devices. These profiles can have their own combination of font styles and sizes, color themes, background blur/transparency levels, etc. You can now create your own custom-styled Terminal that is personalized to your unique taste!
– Open source: complete source code available hosted at… github!
Windows Terminal 1.0 should be released this Winter (around Q4 2019).
Links:
- Introducing Windows Terminal
- Windows Terminal source code @ github
- The new Windows Terminal @ youtube