Windows Terminal Preview v1.16.252

[DHowett]

This one almost speaks for itself. Dang. Welcome to Terminal: Really Long Release Notes Edition!

Features

• Themes: Terminal now has support for themes! (Initial Theme support #12992) (Add a setting for the unfocused tabRow background color #13049) (Add support for tab.background to themes #13178) (Add support for hiding the tab close button #13348) (A pile of Theming nits fixes #13465) (Add support for tab.unfocusedBackground #13689) (Stop writing optional theme fields #13702) (Fixes the color of the dropdown arrow in weird themes #13871)
  • To celebrate this, we've changed the default theme to Windows Dark. If you are not happy about that, you can change it back to light or anything you like (Update the default themes for 1.16 #13743)
• New Text Rendering Engine
  • The new text rendering engine is now enabled by default in Preview builds (Enable AtlasEngine by default in Preview #13752)
  • We've added support for the experimental.pixelShaderPath and experimental.retroTerminalEffect settings... (AtlasEngine: Implement support for custom shaders #13885)
    • ... with a further optimization: shaders that do not use the time component will not trigger a redraw every frame! (atlas: only enable continuous redraw if the shader needs it #13903)
  • It now supports...
    • experimental.rendering.software (AtlasEngine: Add support for SetSoftwareRendering #13886)
    • intenseTextStyle bold (AtlasEngine: Implement LRU invalidation for glyph tiles #13458)
    • underline/overline/hyperlink lines (AtlasEngine: Implement remaining grid lines #13587)
  • Glyphs that have not been used in some time will be aged out and replaced (AtlasEngine: Implement LRU invalidation for glyph tiles #13458) (AtlasEngine: Fix LRU state after scrolling #13607) (AtlasEngine: Fix the fix for LRU state after scrolling #13784) (AtlasEngine: Improve glyph generation performance #13477)
  • Performance over RDP to a machine that has no GPU has been improved (AtlasEngine: Improve RDP performance #13816)
    • (at the cost of some fidelity)
    • experimental.rendering.software will enable this fallback mode as a last resort for compatibility
  • Glyphs that do not fit in a cell will be scaled up or down as appropriate (AtlasEngine: Scale glyphs to better fit the cell size #13549), including "Powerline" glyphs (AtlasEngine: Recognize Powerline glyphs #13650)
  • We've added a setting in the Rendering section, and promoted useAtlasEngine out of the experimental. compartment (AtlasEngine: Remove experimental tag and add tracing #13939)
  • Fonts whose cell sizes were borderline are now rounded instead of clamped to the next pixel size up (AtlasEngine: Round cell sizes to nearest instead of up #13833)
  • We've made some other correctness and compatibility fixes, far too minute to name (AtlasEngine: Fix a correctness bug #13956) (AtlasEngine: Fix bugs introduced in 66f4f9d and d74b66a #13496) (AtlasEngine: Fix various bugs found in testing #13906) (AtlasEngine: Improve robustness against TextBuffer bugs #13530) (AtlasEngine: Remove support for Windows 7 #13608)
  • Somewhat as a side effect of all this, you may notice that you're seeing an inverted cursor where you had not previously seen one!
• This release marks the triumphant return of the "adjust brightness of indistinguishable colors" feature... (Re-enable the setting to adjust the colors of indistinguishable text #13343)
  • ...and it's brought friends: you can now enable it for all color pairs (Change AdjustIndistinguishableColors to an enum setting instead of a boolean setting #13512)
  • You can enable it with the profile setting adjustIndistinguishableColors (enum never, indexed, always; default never)
• We've redesigned the color schemes page (Rejuvenate the color schemes page #13269) and made updates all over the settings UI (Implement MVVM for Color Schemes #13179) (Implement MVVM for the GlobalAppearance page #13390) (Implement MVVM for the Interaction page #13378) (Implement MVVM for the Launch page #13377) (Implement MVVM for the Rendering page #13391)
  • New in this release: color scheme previews, and an easy-access "Set as default color scheme" button!
• You can now configure Terminal to hide when it loses focus (Setting for hide window when it loses focus #13478) (thanks @davidegiacometti!)
• You can now close all panes other than the focused one with the closeOtherPanes action! (Add action for closing all unfocused panes #13547) (thanks @JerBast!)
• There's a new option that lets you configure where new tabs appear: next to the current one, or at the end (Add ability to select where new tab will appear #13421) (Rename newTabPosition values #13602) (Updated schema with newTabPosition setting #13469) (thanks @serd2011!)
  • JSON setting newTabPosition (enum afterLastTab (default), afterCurrentTab)
• Tab and Shift+Tab now navigate between hyperlinks in Mark Mode. You can open the selected link with Ctrl+Enter. (Add keyboard navigation to hyperlinks #13405) ([Follow-up] Polish keyboard navigation to hyperlinks #13494)
• You can now expandSelectionToWord, which will... well, you know. (Introduce ExpandSelectionToWord action #13765)
• We will now try to detect the title when Terminal is launched by default from an LNK file (Wire up passing LNK/EXE data from OpenCon to ITerminalHandoff #13570)
• For the old conhost fans in the room, you can now set experimental.enableColorSelection (global, bool, default false) to add 31 new actions that will highlight search results in the colors of the rainbow (Implement EnableColorSelection #13429)
  • This conhost feature used to be hidden behind a registry key. If you know about it, I think I'm supposed to say you're "one of the real ones?"

Changes

Interaction

• When in mark mode, its built in key bindings Ctrl+A and the modified arrow keys will take precedence over your key bindings (Make Mark Mode keybindings precede custom keybindings #13659)
• We've polished how existing selections interact with mark mode (Polish MarkMode interactions with ExpandSelectionToWord and existing selection #13893)
• @AdamSotak has added quick access buttons for the source code and filing feedback to the About dialog (Added Source Code and Send Feedback buttons to About dialog #13510) (thanks!)
• When your pane is in a light color scheme, the bell flash will now be dark (Flash the pane dark when BEL is emitted in a light terminal #13707) (thanks @Fyrebright!)
• Inverted cursors (which you might find lying around) will now be slightly modulated to account for accidental color overlaps (Make sure the inverted cursor is always readable (#3647) #13748) (thanks @alabuzhev!)
• When you Select All, we'll scroll to the top of the screen (Scroll to top when select all action is invoked #13656)
• Multi-line paste will no longer strip newlines if there are other newlines in the content (Skip whitespace removal for multiline pastes #13698) (thanks @serd2011!)
  • This is to aid in the pasting (after confirmation, of course!) of multi-line commands.

UI

• @dansmor7 figured out that we don't need to draw our caption buttons ourselves; now they look great on all versions of Windows! (Update caption buttons to use glyphs #13341) (thanks!)

Console Compatibility

• We will now discard empty command histories before discarding LRU non-empty ones (Discard empty command histories before discarding LRU non-empty ones #13869) (thanks @serd2011!)
• ReadConsoleOutput will no longer return nonsense if you wrote nonsense to the text buffer (API BREAKING CHANGE) (Introduce breaking changes to ReadConsoleOutput #13321)

VT Support

• We now support DECBKM (Backarrow Key Mode) (Add support for DECBKM (Backarrow Key Mode) #13894) (thanks @j4james!)
• The slow march to soft font support in Terminal continues . . . (Add support for soft fonts in the DX renderer #13362) (thanks @j4james!)

Bug Fixes

Interaction

• Terminal will now use the tab's active title for Export Text (Use the tab's active title for Export Text #13915) (thanks @serd2011!)
• The Emoji picker, PinYin IME or any other IME will no longer drift off the bottom of the screen (oops) (Use the viewport-relative cursor pos for CCore.CursorPosition #13785)
• The settings UI will now disable "Always show tabs" when "Hide the title bar" is enabled (Disable "Always show tabs" when "Hide the title bar" is enabled #13694) (thanks @leejy12!)
• We'll no longer helpfully offer to put things like \\ and : in your filenames for Export Text (oops) (Disallow certain non-filename characters in Export Text #13693) (thanks @eliaschiavon!)
• We've fixed command line argument parsing when there was a one-letter argument followed by a ; (Fixe arg parsing when one-character argument is followed by ; #13706) (thanks @serd2011!)
• In the command palette, the 'go back' button will finally returns to the previously selected action (Make cmd palette 'go back' button return to previously selected action #13504) (thanks @JerBast!)

UI

• No longer is there a 1-pixel gap under inactive tabs (Remove the 1px gap under inactive tabs #13897)

Accessibility

• The Command Palette has become much chattier, announcing (to a screen reader) the name of the selected item ([a11y] Make CommandPalette announce selected item #13519)
• Asking for INT_MAX characters via UIA will no longer wig us out or try to send you multiple gigabytes of null bytes ([UIA] Prevent erroneous L'\0' padding in GetText(INT_MAX) #13779)
  • However, it remains impolite to ask for INT_MAX characters via ITextPattern::GetText.

Performance

• Terminal is now 1.2 megabytes smaller on disk (uncompressed) thanks to not using RTTI (Disable RTTI on TerminalApp and friends #13947) (thanks RTTI!)
• Updating the jumplist used to happen on every launch. Now it will only happen if you've actually changed your settings (Call UpdateJumplist only if the settings changed #13692)

Reliability

• Fixed a number of crashes, not all of which were common or user-impacting:
  • Attempted a fix for the SignalTextChanged crash (An attempted fix for the SignalTextChanged crash #13876)
  • Attempted another fix, this time for the _refreshSizeUnderLock crash (Attempt to fix the _refreshSizeUnderLock crash #13857)
  • Fixed a crash in _WritePseudoWindowCallback (Fix a crash in _WritePseudoWindowCallback #13777)
  • Fixed a crash on exit with the command palette open (Fix a crash on exit with the command palette open #13778)
  • Fixed a race condition in UpdatePatternLocations (Fix a race condition in UpdatePatternLocations #13859)
  • Fixed two race conditions around pseudo window visibility (Fix two race conditions around pseudo window visibility #13832)
  • Fixed a crash in NVDA, caused by us considering a specific text range invalid (Revert "Remove most uses of CompareInBounds (#13244)" #13907)
  • Fixed a ControlCore race condition on connection close (Fix a ControlCore race condition on connection close #13882)
  • Fixed a crash on settings reload (Fix a crash on settings reload #13644)
  • Fixed a crash when showTabsInTitlebar:false (Fix a crash when showTabsInTitlebar:false #13561)
  • Fixed crash on save in rejuv'd Color Schemes page (Fix crash on save in rejuv'd Color Schemes page #13902)
• Terminal should now more reliably appear in the context menu
• We've stopped conhost from buying the farm when it got --headless without --signal (Fix conhost crashing on --headless without --signal #13950)

With additional thanks to our documentation and code health contributors @jsoref and @LitoMore.

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This discussion was created from the release Windows Terminal Preview v1.16.252.

[ofek]

First link should be https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/customize-settings/themes

[DHowett]

Thanks! I just hit save on the update before I got the e-mail about this comment.

The docs weren't live at 12:00 Central Time, and I wanted to make sure that people could still read 'em, so I went with a review link.

[ofek]

I couldn't access it, it was asking me to try a different account

[DHowett]

Darn, it looks like I misjudged how accessible it would be. The right link is now available in both copies of the release notes. Thanks for letting me know!

[MystPi]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but when do pre-release releases get released to become the latest version? That was a mouthful. 😅

[DHowett]

That's an excellent question! We've been promoting Preview to Stable every 6 or so weeks, depending on how stable it's been. We may slow it down as we get more and more users, just to make sure we're letting stuff bake.

I generally recommend people use Preview if they can. We try to keep it safe, since we use it every day on the team! 😄

[MystPi]

Thank you very much for the detailed answer! As you can probably tell, I'm pretty hyped about this release.

Should I use the Windows Terminal Preview app on the Windows Store, the binary from the release, or the one from winget? I am currently using the one from the Windows Store.

[xenobytezero]

Apologies but I don't know where to put this since the actual issues talking about it are closed.

I have updated to Terminal Preview 1.16.2641.0 and am still not seeing "Open in Terminal Preview" anywhere except when RMBing on a folder. Does not appear when clicking in the background of a folder, or on the desktop, which both should theoretically be fixed according to the commit

From Win10 20H2

[DHowett]

Sorry, I saw your comment on the original issue and failed to reopen it. I'll promote this to its own issue. I appreciate the new report :)

[zadjii-msft]

Guidance on.... what exactly?