Welcome to the Windows Terminal, Console and Command-Line repo

<details> <summary><strong>Table of Contents</strong></summary>

• Installing and running Windows Terminal
  • Microsoft Store [Recommended]
  • Other install methods
    • Via GitHub
    • Via Windows Package Manager CLI (aka winget)
    • Via Chocolatey (unofficial)
    • Via Scoop (unofficial)
• Installing Windows Terminal Canary
• Terminal & Console Overview
  • Windows Terminal
  • The Windows Console Host
  • Shared Components
  • Creating the new Windows Terminal
• Resources
• FAQ
  • I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console
• Documentation
• Contributing
• Communicating with the Team
• Developer Guidance
• Prerequisites
• Building the Code
  • Building in PowerShell
  • Building in Cmd
• Running & Debugging
  • Coding Guidance
• Code of Conduct

</details> <br />

This repository contains the source code for:

• Windows Terminal
• Windows Terminal Preview
• The Windows console host (conhost.exe)
• Components shared between the two projects
• ColorTool
• Sample projects that show how to consume the Windows Console APIs

Related repositories include:

• Windows Terminal Documentation (Repo: Contribute to the docs)
• Console API Documentation
• Cascadia Code Font

Installing and running Windows Terminal

[!NOTE] Windows Terminal requires Windows 10 2004 (build 19041) or later

Microsoft Store [Recommended]

Install the [Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store][store-install-link]. This allows you to always be on the latest version when we release new builds with automatic upgrades.

This is our preferred method.

Other install methods

Via GitHub

For users who are unable to install Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store, released builds can be manually downloaded from this repository's Releases page.

Download the Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_<versionNumber>.msixbundle file from the Assets section. To install the app, you can simply double-click on the .msixbundle file, and the app installer should automatically run. If that fails for any reason, you can try the following command at a PowerShell prompt:

# NOTE: If you are using PowerShell 7+, please run
# Import-Module Appx -UseWindowsPowerShell
# before using Add-AppxPackage.

Add-AppxPackage Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_<versionNumber>.msixbundle

[!NOTE] If you install Terminal manually:

• You may need to install the VC++ v14 Desktop Framework Package. This should only be necessary on older builds of Windows 10 and only if you get an error about missing framework packages.
• Terminal will not auto-update when new builds are released so you will need to regularly install the latest Terminal release to receive all the latest fixes and improvements!

Via Windows Package Manager CLI (aka winget)

winget users can download and install the latest Terminal release by installing the Microsoft.WindowsTerminal package:

winget install --id Microsoft.WindowsTerminal -e

[!NOTE] Dependency support is available in WinGet version 1.6.2631 or later. To install the Terminal stable release 1.18 or later, please make sure you have the updated version of the WinGet client.

Via Chocolatey (unofficial)

Chocolatey users can download and install the latest Terminal release by installing the microsoft-windows-terminal package:

choco install microsoft-windows-terminal

To upgrade Windows Terminal using Chocolatey, run the following:

choco upgrade microsoft-windows-terminal

If you have any issues when installing/upgrading the package please go to the Windows Terminal package page and follow the Chocolatey triage process

Via Scoop (unofficial)

Scoop users can download and install the latest Terminal release by installing the windows-terminal package:

scoop bucket add extras
scoop install windows-terminal

To update Windows Terminal using Scoop, run the following:

scoop update windows-terminal

If you have any issues when installing/updating the package, please search for or report the same on the issues page of Scoop Extras bucket repository.

---

Installing Windows Terminal Canary

Windows Terminal Canary is a nightly build of Windows Terminal. This build has the latest code from our main branch, giving you an opportunity to try features before they make it to Windows Terminal Preview.

Windows Terminal Canary is our least stable offering, so you may discover bugs before we have had a chance to find them.

Windows Terminal Canary is available as an App Installer distribution and a Portable ZIP distribution.

The App Installer distribution supports automatic updates. Due to platform limitations, this installer only works on Windows 11.

The Portable ZIP distribution is a portable application. It will not automatically update and will not automatically check for updates. This portable ZIP distribution works on Windows 10 (19041+) and Windows 11.

| Distribution | Architecture | Link | |---------------|:---------------:|------------------------------------------------------| | App Installer | x64, arm64, x86 | Download | | Portable ZIP | x64 | Download | | Portable ZIP | ARM64 | Download | | Portable ZIP | x86 | Download |

Learn more about the types of Windows Terminal distributions.

---

Terminal & Console Overview

Please take a few minutes to review the overview below before diving into the code:

Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users. It includes many of the features most frequently requested by the Windows command-line community including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming & styling, and more.

The Terminal will also need to meet our goals and measures to ensure it remains fast and efficient, and doesn't consume vast amounts of memory or power.

The Windows Console Host

The Windows Console host, conhost.exe, is Windows' original command-line user experience. It also hosts Windows' command-line infrastructure and the Windows Console API server, input engine, rendering engine, user preferences, etc. The console host code in this repository is the actual source from which the conhost.exe in Windows itself is built.

Since taking ownership of the Windows command-line in 2014, the team added several new features to the Console, including background transparency, line-based selection, support for ANSI / Virtual Terminal sequences, 24-bit color, a Pseudoconsole ("ConPTY"), and more.

However, because Windows Console's primary goal is to maintain backward compatibility, we have been unable to add many of the features the community (and the team) have been wanting for the last several years including tabs, unicode text, and emoji.

These limitations led us to create the new Windows Terminal.

You can read more about the evolution of the command-line in general, and the Windows command-line specifically in this accompanying series of blog posts on the Command-Line team's blog.

Shared Components

While overhauling Windows Console, we modernized its codebase considerably, cleanly separating logical entities into modules and classes, introduced some key extensibility points, replaced several old, home-grown collections and containers with safer, more efficie