Microsoft has on Monday, May 6 announced at its Build developer conference that Windows 10 is getting a new terminal for command-line users.
Windows Visual changes
The Windows Terminal features tabs and themes, and will essentially become the default environment for PowerShell, Command Prompt and Windows Subsystem for Linux users going forward.
Windows had long had an inferior command line environment compared to other operating systems. Windows 10’s WSL, which lets you run Bash and other Linux shells, seems great.
Microsoft has been working hard on improving the old Windows Console for years. The company has added a variety of “experimental console features” like Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste, which are disabled by default. After all, they might break legacy applications using the old Command Prompt.
Microsoft even swapped the console color scheme with a new, more readable one. They worked hard on adding Unicode support to the existing console environment as well as support for VT codes so complex Linux apps like tmux would be usable.
The new terminal will feature faster GPU-accelerated text rending and “emoji-rich” fonts, because everything these days needs to support emojis, and those will sure help lighten up the command-line user experience.
Beyond the visual changes, what’s more?
Beyond the visual changes, Microsoft also announced “Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.” This will reportedly offer up to twice the performance of the current version of WSL for filesystem-heavy operations. Windows 10 will include a Linux kernel to make this possible.
The new so-called “Windows Terminal” will launch in mid-June and promises to be a major update of the existing Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell experience.
It must be noted that this new application won’t immediately replace the classic Windows Console environment despite the fact that Microsoft says the idea is to “elevate the command-line user experience on Windows.”
The first preview of the new Windows Terminal is now available.
By Edward Kyei Frimpong-Mybeeponline
