Although Windows is an operating system designed to be used from a graphical environment, with its intuitive windows and buttons, this operating system has several consoles that allow us to manage and use the OS through commands. CMD, PowerShell, and even Azure and WSL are present on this system. These consoles allow us to carry out all kinds of administrative tasks in the system, automate certain actions and even run programs and tools that do not have an interface. However, in a short time we have gotten together with many consoles, with archaic interfaces, which are rather impractical to use. And this is where Windows Terminal comes in.
Windows Terminal is a new open source console, developed by Microsoft, whose main purpose is to allow us to group all the OS consoles in one place. This program, developed as a UWP , has a very clear and intuitive interface, with a multitude of functions and customization options, and also support for tabs. The last against that this software had was its configuration , which had to be done in text mode. However, since the last version 1.6, this has gone down in history.
Microsoft has continued to work on the development of this program. Little by little it becomes an increasingly complete program, until a time comes when it is essential software. Thus, after a month of development, Microsoft has just presented version 1.7 of Windows Terminal . And it brings a lot of improvements and news that we are going to see next.
What’s new in Windows Terminal 1.7
The first of the novelties that we find is that, from now on, Terminal will allow us to choose what we want to do when opening the console for the first time. By default, until now, only a new window was opened, but from the settings we will be able to do.
This terminal now has a new keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + N. If we press it, we will be able to open a new console window configured by default in order to start working on it. Of course, this new window will also have its corresponding windows.
If we are one of those who usually use the consoles remotely , from this new version this will be much easier. Microsoft has included a large number of changes in this regard, but the most important is that, from now on, the windows activated by this remote control will remain in the background.
As we have said, Windows Terminal 1.6 introduced a new settings interface that allowed us to configure the program from there instead of having to modify different text files. Now, with the arrival of version 1.7, this interface is already activated by default.
We can make any window or any tab ” read-only “. This will help us avoid closing it by mistake, and will show us a warning when we try to write to it.
Other less important changes are:
- The “wt” command will now be able to run commands in any existing window.
- Support for focus-follows-mouse, in true X11 style.
- Ability to import color schemes.
- New findNext and findPrev actions.
Download
The new version 1.7, for now, is only available within the ” Preview ” branch. This means that only users who download the early version of this program will be able to enjoy the news before anyone else, but assuming there may be problems.
Windows Terminal 1.7 is available to all users within the Microsoft Store, of course, completely free of charge.
And if we don’t want to use the Microsoft store, we can always hand- download the msixbundle package from its GitHub repository for double-click installation.