Microsoft is releasing Windows Terminal Preview version 1.1 bringing a set of new features to developers. New features include "Open in Windows Terminal" option in the File Explorer right-click menu, tab updates, font weight support, and more.
These features will move to Windows Terminal - Microsoft's tabbed, powerful, and productive terminal for power users - next month. But if you want to test them out now, you can download Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store or GitHub.
Here is what's new with Windows Terminal Preview v1.1
Open in Windows Terminal
You can now right click on a folder in File Explorer and select “Open in Windows Terminal”. This will launch Windows Terminal with your default profile in the directory you had selected from File Explorer.
👉 Note: This will launch Windows Terminal Preview until this feature moves into Windows Terminal in July 2020. Additionally, there are still some known bugs that we are working on, including right-clicking in the directory “background” will not give you the Open in Windows Terminal option.
Launch Windows Terminal on startup
A new setting has been added by jelster that allows you to set Windows Terminal to launch when starting up your machine! You can set startOnUserLogin to true in your global settings to enable this functionality.
"startOnUserLogin":true
👉 Note: If the Windows Terminal startup task entry is disabled either by organization policy or by user action, this setting will have no effect.
Font weight support
Windows Terminal Preview now supports font weights as a new profile setting. The fontWeight setting accepts a variety of strings describing font weights along with the corresponding numeric representation of a font weight. Full documentation of this new setting can be found on the Windows Terminal docs site.
"fontWeight":"normal"
🌟 Pictured here is a sneak peek of the light version of Cascadia Code. Font weights for Cascadia Code are expected to ship within the next few months!
Alt+Click to open a pane
If you’d like to open a profile from the dropdown menu as a pane in the current window, you can click on it while holding Alt. This will open that profile in a pane by using the auto split feature, which will split the active window or pane across the longest length.
Tab updates
Color picker
You can now color your tabs by right-clicking on them and selecting “Color…”. This will open the tab color menu where you can select a predefined color or expand the menu to select any color using the color picker, hex code, or RGB fields. The colors for each tab will persist for that terminal session. A huge thank you goes out to gbaychev for contributing this feature!
💡 Tip: Use the same hex code that is used as your background color for a seamless experience!
Renaming
In the same context menu where the color picker lives, we have added a tab rename option. Clicking this will change your tab title into a text box, where you can rename your tab for that terminal session.
Compact sizing
Thanks to WinUI 2.4, we have added compact tab sizing as an option for the tabs in the tabWidthMode global setting. This will shrink every inactive tab to the width of the icon, leaving the active tab more space to display its full title.
"tabWidthMode":"compact"
New command line arguments
We have added some additional commands to use as arguments when calling wt from the command line. The first is --maximized,-M, which will launch Windows Terminal as maximized. The second is --fullscreen,-F, which launches Windows Terminal as full screen. These two commands cannot be combined.
The last is --title, which allows you to customize the title of the tab before launching Windows Terminal. This behaves just like the tabTitle profile setting.
👉 Note: If you have both Windows Terminal and Windows Terminal Preview installed, the wt command will use Windows Terminal and will not have these new arguments until July 2020. You can change the wt executable to point to Windows Terminal Preview by following this tutorial.
Open defaults.json with the keyboard
If you’d like to open the defaults.json file with the keyboard, we added a new default key binding of "ctrl+alt+,". The openSettings command has received new actions that enable you to open the settings.json file, defaults.json file, or both with "settingsFile", "defaultsFile", or "allFiles" respectively.
About the author: Rafia joined Wccftech in 2012 as a tech reporter. She is currently working on stories focusing on people and technologies that are turning Microsoft into a “company to watch” again.
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