The Windows Terminal project is engineered and delivered as a set of 4-week milestones. The app comes with an icon that reminds of new Office and OneDrive icons, reflecting Microsoft's modern design view known as 'Fluent Design'. Thanks to the new tabbed console, it allows organizing instances of Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux together in a single app. Microsoft says the new engine is “supports additional pixel shaders (including the retro effect), bold text, and underline/overline/hyperlink lines.Windows Terminal is fully open-sourced.

That feature was introduced earlier this year, but it had enough bugs and performance issues that rolling it out to everyone was delayed until now. Microsoft has also enabled the “Atlas Engine” by default, which renders text in Windows Terminal with DirectX 3D acceleration. The dark theme is now the default, instead of the active Windows system theme. There are a few other visual updates in Terminal 1.16. The settings are defined as a simple JSON object, so it’s easy to copy them between computers or share with others. Each theme can have a name and customizations to the window, tabs, tab row, and active tab.

Windows Terminal 1.16, which is now in Preview, introduces a new “themes” global property in the Terminal settings. You can already customize the colors, font, and other parts of the Windows Terminal, but starting with the next update, the changes will be easier to swap and share. Windows Terminal is the new preferred command-line interface for Windows, with support for PowerShell, Command Prompt, WSL, and other environments all in one place.

Windows terminal preview download