Introducing Windows Terminal

I have to hand it to Microsoft. WSL 2, Windows Terminal, and Edge based on Chromium. Microsoft really is doing some fantastic work for their users.<p>Meanwhile, macOS will get new emojis in 10.15.

If someone wants an app idea (which might now be possible since Windows Terminal is open source &amp; DirectX based)...<p>I&#x27;ve been looking for a Windows replacement to Cathode [1], a macOS app that makes the terminal look like a CRT monitor. Not just the colour scheme &amp; font, but with screen jitter, image persistence &amp; glow, static, scanlines and even sound effects sampled from old computers. For the times I have to use a terminal, it really makes me smile &amp; enjoy the work.<p>Linux has Cool Retro Term which is similar, and there have been efforts to port that to Windows that have failed. I could probably run Cool Retro Term under WSL2, but Windows deserves something native.<p>It seems more likely that an indie developer might be able to fork Terminal &amp; create their own than Microsoft building this in. (As much as I like the idea of Windows having a Fruity IIe terminal theme built-in.)<p>Cathode charges $5 which is much too cheap - I&#x27;d pay $20 easily (maybe more) for something that brightens up my work day the way Cathode does.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.secretgeometry.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;cathode&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.secretgeometry.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;cathode&#x2F;</a>

Good on them for making CMD more modern.<p>But I&#x27;m not a fan of the ligatures they&#x27;ve shown in the video &#x2F; screenshots. This was discussed on HN recently after this article got posted: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;practicaltypography.com&#x2F;ligatures-in-programming-fonts-hell-no.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;practicaltypography.com&#x2F;ligatures-in-programming-fon...</a><p>Luckily, the font seems to just be an option and not something forced on you.

And here is MIT-licensed source code for it <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;terminal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;terminal</a>

Given that the existing terminals for Windows range from archaic (Console, PowerShell) to mediocre (ConEmu, Cmder), this move makes total sense.<p>I’m excited to use the new terminal with WSL2 - maybe it will come close to iTerm2 with Docker.

I haven&#x27;t seen Alacritty mentioned yet as an existing alternative for built-in terminals. It&#x27;s modern, configurable and really fast (thanks to GPU acceleration and possibly Rust). I&#x27;ve enjoyed using it with W10 native OpenSSH.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jwilm&#x2F;alacritty" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jwilm&#x2F;alacritty</a>

Happy to see it&#x27;s not another Electron based terminal

its interesting how long its taking for MS to do command-line well and linux to do the gui well. after decades you would think each could be considered a solved problem, at least given that they are solved by their respective OSes, yet there has not been the convergence you might expect

This looks great. I&#x27;ve tried many of the other terminal options on Windows (ConEmu, Cmdr, Hyper, etc) and none have been great and always found myself resorting back to the plain old command prompt.

Trying to build from it requires VS + 16GB of build tools... what in the world.

Will content in the terminal re-render when the window is resized or will it be like Putty where only new content fills the whole window (annoying)?

Everyone who wants this but prefers not downloading 16 Gigabytes of Visual Studio to build this should have a look at Fluent Terminal [1], which can be installed through chocolatey and in my opinion even looks a little better (might not have all of the features, though).<p>I&#x27;ve been using it for a while and have been very happy with it and have for all that time wished that they would just adopt it as a default app. Oh look :-)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;felixse&#x2F;FluentTerminal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;felixse&#x2F;FluentTerminal</a>

Is this different to the thread earlier today?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19840447" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19840447</a>

Does anyone know if the default cut&#x2F;copy&#x2F;paste key equivalents in Windows Terminal are ctrl-x&#x2F;ctrl-c&#x2F;ctrl-v like everything else in Windows, or is it still that weird system from CMD.EXE which is an abomination unto Nuggan?<p>I haven&#x27;t been able to find this out. I even tweeted at someone on the Windows Terminal team and didn&#x27;t get a response.<p>EDIT: I looked through the github repo and it <i>does</i> appear to support sane key equivalents. Nuggan be praised!

This is great. I recently shifted to woking more with windows&#x2F;WSL after much frustration with mac. However the terminal experience was not great. The electron based options where not fast enough, default WSL shell was comparably fast to iTerm but did not even have basic tabs. Microsoft is really doing a lot of good and exciting stuff nowadays.

How long till somebody goes through and ports it to Linux I wonder. Then Microsoft maintains the port turning it into the most powerful cross platform terminal emulator somehow. Also Mac please. But I am likely getting ahead of myself.

The real question is - can it display videos using sixel?

So, UTF-8 support?

transparency at last -- i hope its customizable

So the main differentiator is a prettier terminal window relative to microsoft console?

Great! Now if we could just switch the path separator over to &#x2F;

FFS, why didn&#x27;t they also provide a binary download? I don&#x27;t want to download it and build it...

Wow, so much marketing voodoo for a text terminal!