An early preview of the new Windows Terminal is now available

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Microsoft is working on a new open source terminal application that could potentially replace the Command Prompt sometime down the line, and you can test drive a preview version right now.
It's called Windows Terminal, and you can find it in the Microsoft Store. Beyond being a "very early preview" with some feature limitations, the other caveat is that you must be running Windows 10 with the May 2019 update installed.






So, what exactly is it?

"The Windows Terminal is a new, modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application for users of command-line tools an shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL. Its main features include multiple tabs, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, a GPU accelerated text rendering engine, and custom themes, styles, and configurations," Microsoft explains.


It's sort of a better version of both the Command Prompt and PowerShell, though that's selling its capabilities a bit short. First announced at Build 2019, both of those can be accessed from within the Windows Terminal. So can various Linux terminals, all from within a single window.


Visually, the Windows Terminal is a dramatic departure from the Command Prompt. Everything is customizable (via a JSON file, which is opened with a separate text editor), from the size and color text, to being able to write your own key bindings for any function you might want to invoke from within the terminal. It also supports background images, or you can have an acrylic background with a blur effect.


"This means each of your profiles can be uniquely styled with different background images," Microsoft explains.
 
Terminal for Windows sounds like a useful tool for more advance users like software developers and system administrators.
 
I guess this could be a good option for a Linux user. But I can't see a whole lot of use for it in most other cases. Even then it still sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
 
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