Windows Terminal will Become the Default Terminal App in 2022

Back in early 2019, Microsoft announced that it was going to make Windows Terminal the default system terminal. During that time, Windows Terminal seems to have been inspired by Linux, introducing modern features such as tabs. The latest news is that starting in 2022, Microsoft will make Windows Terminal the default terminal program on the Windows 11 operating system.

Windows Terminal will become the default option next year

Any user who has encountered and solved problems with Windows many times on their own should be no stranger to the Command Prompt or PowerShell. However, according to the latest statement from Microsoft program manager Kayla Cinnamon, the default command line tool on Win11 will be changed to Windows Terminal starting in 2022.

As planned, the default Windows Terminal program on Windows 11 will be the first to be pushed out to participants of the Preview Experience program. In the meantime, Microsoft keeps building new features for Windows Terminal, such as more colorful colors, emoji, new fonts, and bringing a great tab/pane experience.

Even better, Microsoft has chosen to use the MIT Open Source license for Windows Terminal, meaning that interested parties can more easily participate in the project on GitHub. It supports multiple tabs, themes, powerful customization features, full GPU rendering text/emoji features, and more.

According to Microsoft, any application with a command line interface can be run in the Windows terminal. This includes all applications from PowerShell, Command Prompt, Azure Cloud Shell and any WSL distribution (such as Ubuntu or Oh-My-Zsh).

In simple terms, PowerShell can be understood as an upgraded version of cmd, compatible with the command format used by the original cmd, and supports commands uniformly using the cmdlet command format. Terminal integrates the three environments of PowerShell, cmd and Windows Linux Subsystem (WSL) on Windows, and you can search and install it in the store if you need it for Win10.

Latest versions of Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal v1.11.2921.0 (official version) and v1.12.2931.0 (preview version) already support manual setting as the default terminal, after that either CMD or PowerShell will run in the new Windows Terminal. In addition, Microsoft also released Windows Terminal v1.11.3471.0 (official version) and Windows Terminal Preview v1.12.3472.0 (preview version).

Windows Terminal v1.11.3471.0 official version.

▶ Improvements:

• Comes with Cascadia Code 2111.01 font

▶ Fixes:

• Default Terminal options will work on computers without Visual C++ Redistributable
• Splitting unfocused tabs will no longer show errors
• UI related fixes
• Window borders appear correctly when using Win+↓ in full screen mode
• Information tips no longer cover tabs when showTabsInTitleBar is set to false
• Detected URLs will no longer be offset by complex unicode characters on the same line

Windows Terminal Preview v1.12.3472.0 Preview version.

▶ Improvements:

• Comes with Cascadia Code 2111.01 font
• Terminal now supports "Align Layout" feature in Windows 11

▶ Fixes:

• Default Terminal options work on computers without Visual C++ Redistributable
• Splitting unfocused tabs will no longer show errors

▶ UI related fixes:

• GetConsoleCommandHistoryLengthA will respond with the correct length
• Window borders appear correctly when using Win+↓ in full screen mode
• Opacity slider is now displayed correctly
• InfoTabs will no longer cover tabs when showTabsInTitleBar is set to false
• Fixed a bug in printing hexadecimal error codes with negative signs
• Closing has become more reliable
• Measured URLs will no longer be offset by complex Unicode characters on the same line