Windows Terminal Preview v1.15.186

[DHowett]

It's Summer in the US, which means that it's really hot there's a new Terminal preview release!

Here's what's in it:

Why are there so many packages? How do I choose?

This version of Windows Terminal is distributed in two bundles, one of which works on Windows 10-11 and the other of which only works on Windows 11. The Windows 11 version is much smaller because we no longer need to work around a platform issue related to our dependencies.

If you intend on using Terminal as an unpackaged application--that is, extracting the msix file--we recommend that
you use the Win10 bundle. You will need the Visual C++ runtime
redistributable.

In addition, if you install the packaged version on either Windows 10 or Windows 11, it now depends on the Visual C++
Universal Runtime
Package.

Despite these distributions having different version numbers, they are built from the same code and there is no
functional difference between them.

If you install the Windows 10 verison on Windows 11, it will probably automatically upgrade itself to the Windows 11
version. It turns out that it is impossible to have two bundles with the same version number, so it has to be this
way.

Features

• Selecting text in the terminal just got better!
  • Use the markMode action to enter mark mode and create a selection at the cursor (Introduce Mark Mode #13053) (Miscellaneous bug fixes for Mark Mode #13358)
    • This is bound to Ctrl+Shift+M by default. Be sure to try it out!
  • Selections made with the keyboard now display a selection marker UI (Add selection marker overlays for keyboard selection #10865)
  • Use the switchSelectionEndpoint action to switch which endpoint you are moving in a selection (Introduce switchSelectionEndpoint action #13370)
  • Use the toggleBlockSelection action to transform your existing selection into a block selection (Introduce toggleBlockSelection action #13219)
• [Experimental] We now support scrollbar marks! (Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948) (Implement the FTCS_PROMPT sequence for marking the start of the prompt #13163) (Update the scrollbar postiton on scrollToMark #13291) (Update schema with scroll marks actions and settings #13414)
  • Use the addMark action to add a scrollbar mark
    • The color optional parameter can be used to specify a color
  • Use the scrollToMark action with a specified direction parameter to scroll between the marks
  • Use the clearMark action to remove a selected mark
  • Use the clearAllMarks action to remove all scrollbar marks
  • The experimental.autoMarkPrompts global setting can be set to true to automatically mark each prompt
    • NOTE: This uses the FTCS_PROMPT sequence from FinalTerm, OSC 133 ; A, which we now support! (Implement the FTCS_PROMPT sequence for marking the start of the prompt #13163)
  • The experimental.showMarksOnScrollbar global setting can also be set to true to display the marks on your scrollbar
• If you're new to Windows Terminal Preview, but already have Windows Terminal installed and customized, we now migrate your settings over (Initialize Terminal Preview settings from Terminal settings #12907) (thanks @huiyooumich!)
• The tab's context menu now has "Find" as an option (Add find item to tab menu #13055) (thanks @Predelnik!)

Changes

• "Open settings file" commands now explicitly mention "JSON" for easier searching (Add "JSON" to the "Open settings file" command names #13265)
• Color schemes now support "purple" and "magenta" interchangeably in the JSON (Accept color name "magenta" instead of "purple" #13261) (thanks @matthewd673!)
• An accelerator key is now defined for the "Open in Terminal" shell extension (Add an accelerator key for the shell extension #13080) (thanks @ianjoneill!)
• The settings UI's "Save" pane now aligns with the "Open JSON file" footer (Fix mis-aligned Navigationview footer and save buttons in the settings page #13282) (thanks @HO-COOH!)
• The Default Terminal setting in settings UI now has a "Let Windows decide" option (Use feature markers during terminal-by-default handoff #13160)
  • An occasional crash while opening the settings UI has been stomped out (same PR!)
• The "Save" and "Discard changes" buttons were reordered in the settings UI to more closely follow the Windows UI guidelines (Reorder "save" and "discard changes" buttons in the SUI #13237)
• @dansmor7 has refined how colored tabs look when they're out of focus or hovered (Update tab hover colors #13434) (thanks!)

More Escape Sequences and expanded VT support

Courtesy of @j4james:

• Applications can now use DECCTR to alter the terminal's color scheme (Add support for restoring a DECCTR color table report #13139) (Restore the DECCTR color table report over conpty #13227)
• The same applications can now use DECAC to assign a color to the default foreground and background colors, as well as change the tab background color (Add support for the DECAC escape sequence #13058)
• Other applications can now use DECPS to play a basic sequence of musical notes (Add support for the DECPS (Play Sound) escape sequence #13208)
  • This feature is preview-only until we can make sure the MIDI sound font is available everywhere Stable ships.

Documentation

• building.md and mouseInput.cpp got cleaned up a bit (Fix typos in dev build script #13333) (thanks @ofek and @oferze!)
• We added a Gannt chart to the roadmap (Update roadmap for 1.13, 1.14. #13234)

Bug Fixes

• We no longer suppress black blackground or gray foreground for PowerShell (Disable the VT color quirk for pwsh and modern inbox powershell #13352)
  • We have chosen to remove this workaround as newer versions of PowerShell's PSReadline component contain a fix for the issue.
  • This was a compatibility band-aid that was impacting the capabilities of great projects such as Oh My Posh.
  • ❗ If you see unexpected black backgrounds appearing behind text while typing a command in PowerShell, make sure your PSReadline version is up to date. You can update your version of PSReadline by running the command, Update-Module PSReadline.
• The Default Terminal banner is now hidden if you opened a session via default terminal (Dismiss Terminal-by-default banner on handoff #13344)
  • AKA: We won't nag you to set Terminal as your default if it's demonstrably the default ;P
• [O is no longer output erroneously from focus events for clients of libuv like neovim (Filter focus events that came from the API #13260)
• AtlasEngine no longer secretly increases the font size of HTML/RTF copies when the font changes (Fix coordSizeUnscaled calculation in AtlasEngine #13384)
• Keyboard selection is now limited to the scrollable area (Fix moving selection past scroll area #13318)
• The "Open in Terminal" shell extension is now hidden when accessing a non-filesystem path like "Quick Actions" (Hide "Open in Terminal" context menu option appropriately #13206) (thanks @leejy12!)
• Clearing the screen via cls or Clear-Host won't leave behind an erroneous line of text (Make sure conpty is flushed before clearing scrollback #13324) (thanks @j4james!)
• Default Terminal sessions now properly pass focus events when opened (Make sure foreground access works for DefTerm #13247)
• Terminal will now use Unicode 14.0 to determine the width of some Unicode characters (Regenerate CodepointWidthDetector from Unicode 14.0 #13292)
• We will no longer try to launch wsl to ask it to tell us about distributions when it's obvious that you don't have any (Remove the fallback to wsl.exe when HKCU\...\Lxss doesn't exist #13436)
• We've fixed a minor race condition in default terminal handoff that impacted nobody (Fix a race condition in CTerminalHandoff::s_StopListening #13410)

Reliability

• We no longer crash when a screen reader is reading from a CLI app using the alt buffer (Fix a11y crash in alt buffer apps #13250) (Remove most uses of CompareInBounds #13244)
• Deleting the last profile in the settings UI no longer causes a crash (Fix deleting the last profile crashing Terminal #13242)
• Opening Windows Terminal via the Win+X menu no longer occasionally crashes (Fix SetConsoleWindowInfo being able to crash ConPTY #13212)
• SetConsoleWindowInfo can no longer crash a terminal tab (Fix SetConsoleWindowInfo being able to crash ConPTY #13212)

---

This discussion was created from the release Windows Terminal Preview v1.15.186.

[afkvido]

cool

[m1ngl]

帅！

[TBBle]

The auto-mark prompts thing sounds really cool (e.g., for "scroll to start of whatever verbose output I'm staring at" purposes), and I just had a skim of #11000 and the related PRs.

Specifically on

• The experimental.autoMarkPrompts global setting can be set to true to automatically mark each prompt
  • NOTE: This uses the FTCS_PROMPT sequence from FinalTerm, OSC 133 ; A, which we now support! Implement the FTCS_PROMPT sequence for marking the start of the prompt #13163

I was curious about this, and it seems from the code that this pair of dot-points has conflated two things? I haven't tried it yet (I'm on my non-Terminal-preview machine) but it looks like FTCS_PROMPT works always, while experimental.autoMarkPrompts (which is a per-session setting AFAICT see #13583) is only used for the heuristic prompt-marking on vkey == VK_RETURN && !_inAltBuffer().

[zadjii-msft]

Meh, yes, those are two related but different things. Ultimately, the experimental.autoMarkPrompts create a "prompt" mark, in the same way that FTCS_PROMPT would. On the backend, we treat them both as the same thing in 1.15.

[XPythonista]

This terminal looks good in trailer not in reality

[zadjii-msft]

Do you have some actionable feedback to provide?

[DanEdens]

He's twelve. My terminal is beautiful, thank you everyone.

[mgjuranic]

I get a following error while trying to install it:

Add-AppPackage : Deployment failed with HRESULT: 0x80073CF3, Package failed updates, dependency or conflict validation.
Windows cannot install package Microsoft.WindowsTerminalPreview_1.15.1862.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe because this package dep
ends on a framework that could not be found. Provide the framework "Microsoft.Midi.GmDls" published by "CN=Microsoft Co
rporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US", with neutral or x64 processor architecture and mini
mum version 1.0.0.0, along with this package to install. The frameworks with name "Microsoft.Midi.GmDls" currently inst
alled are: {}
NOTE: For additional information, look for [ActivityId] 6518c759-9824-0001-dc05-19652498d801 in the Event Log or use th
e command line Get-AppPackageLog -ActivityID 6518c759-9824-0001-dc05-19652498d801
At line:1 char:1

• Add-AppPackage .\Microsoft.WindowsTerminalPreview_Win10_1.15.1862.0_8 ...

•   + CategoryInfo          : WriteError: (C:\Users\mgjura...bbwe.msixbundle:String) [Add-AppxPackage], IOException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : DeploymentError,Microsoft.Windows.Appx.PackageManager.Commands.AddAppxPackageCommand
  

[TBBle]

That's possibly the reason for

This feature is preview-only until we can make sure the MIDI sound font is available everywhere Stable ships.

I'm not sure how you install that Microsoft.Midi.GmDls package manually, though. Presumably if you were installing from the Windows Store, it'd have installed that package automatically. It looks like the Windows 10 SDKs include it in a file named "MidiVoices.appx", if that helps.

[zadjii-msft]

You may also want to refer to #13520