Although Windows is designed to be used in graphic mode, the Microsoft operating system also has different terminals designed to perform certain advanced or administrative tasks. CMD, Microsoft’s legacy console, or PowerShell are two of the consoles that we can find in this OS, although there are also others such as the Windows Subsystem for Linux or the Azure remote console. To keep things simple, Microsoft has been working for a long time on a new console to group them all together, Windows Terminal . And, with its new version, it will greatly simplify the way you work.
Until now, Windows 10 comes by default with CMD and PowerShell as separate programs. And each of them runs in a separate window, from which we can work. The next big update to Windows 10, Sun Valley, is going to arrive full of changes and news. And one of them will be the default installation of Windows Terminal, Microsoft’s all-in-one console, within the operating system.
In addition, from the new version 1.9, we will be able to take much better advantage of everything that this console offers us.
What’s new in Windows Terminal 1.9
Undoubtedly, the main novelty that we are going to find in this new version of the program is the possibility of configuring it as the default console for Windows 10. From Windows 10 Sun Valley, when installing this terminal we will be able to indicate to the operating system that we want that, when you open CMD or PowerShell, it opens directly within it. This option can be found within the Windows Terminal configuration itself, as well as in the CMD options.
Another interesting novelty that has been included in this new version is the ” Quake Mode “. Thanks to this mode, we will be able to invoke a terminal console at any time (in the purest Linux style) using a simple keyboard shortcut, which by default is Windows + `. Pressing that keyboard shortcut again will hide the terminal to continue working normally on the PC.
The Windows Terminal fonts have also been updated. Cascadia Code , Microsoft’s popular font for programmers, has now received an italic variant that makes reading both Latin and Cyrillic characters much easier. Arabic and Hebrew characters have also been added to the font for use on this console.
The ” settings ” section of Windows Terminal is another one that has received changes in this new version. For example, now we will be able to edit our keyboard shortcuts from the “Actions” section to facilitate the customization of the program and adapt it to our needs. The possibility of adding new profiles and customizing the appearance of the program window according to the profiles has also been added.
Finally, several generic optimizations have been made within the console, and a series of bugs and errors detected by the developers themselves and reported by the community through GitHub have been corrected.
Download the console
Insider users who are already using the latest build of Windows 10 21H2 “Sun Valley” may already have this program installed by default in Windows 10. If we are not using this version yet (which will most likely be), we can download the latest version for free from the following link to GitHub.
If we prefer, we can also download this program directly from the Microsoft Store . In this way, we can use the Microsoft store to also keep the program always updated.
Version 1.9 is in the “Preview” phase, so we may have problems.