It's finally here: Windows Terminal Preview 1.19! We've been heads-down, working on a new input buffer, new output buffer, shell suggestions, and a bunch of other stuff that we're excited to finally release.

Buckle up! This release might be a little more Preview than you've come to expect . . . but that's the fun of the preview channel!

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

Please visit our page documenting the different [Windows Terminal Distributions]!

Features

• We've added support for a new opt-in and shell-driven suggestions UI (#14938) (#15848)
  • The protocol for suggestions is not finalized, and will change before final release.
  • You can find more information on the Experimental Shell Completion Menu wiki page
  • Suggestions can take into account...
    • ... the command you've already typed on the input line (#15027)
    • ... commands you have recently submitted (#14943)
    • ... any sendInput actions you have in your settings file, to be used as a sort of "snippet" (#15664)
• The search box will now display a count of found results, and--if scrollbar marks are enabled--display graphical indicators for every match (#14045) (thanks @Don-Vito and @zadjii-msft!)
• You can now enable broadcast mode via the Command Palette, which will broadcast input to all panes in a tab (#14393) (#15993)
• You can now launch a profile via wt and keep its built-in command line with the --appendCommandLine flag (#15822) (thanks @hanpuliu-charles!)
  • For example, if your PowerShell profile specifies pwsh.exe, you can run wt --appendCommandLine -p PowerShell -- -Command echo Hello, which will run pwsh.exe -Command echo Hello. That's a lot of dashes. Wow.
• You can now search the web with your selected text via... (#15539) (thanks @mpela81!)
  • ...the experimental right-click context menu!
  • ...the searchWeb action!
    • You can customize each action to launch any search engine by specifying the queryUrl. %s will be replaced with your query.
  • You can customize the default search engine for both of these by specifying the global setting searchWebDefaultQueryUrl. %s will be replaced with your query.
• If you have shell integration enabled, you can enable using the mouse to reposition the text cursor (#15758)
  • {profile}.experimental.repositionCursorWithMouse (the dot is part of the name, sorry) (boolean, default false)

Theming and Scheming

• You can now set the window border color on Windows 11 via the {theme}.window.frame and {theme}.window.unfocusedFrame color entries (#15441)
  • For more fun, you can set {theme}.window's experimental.rainbowFrame to true 🙂
• You can now (finally!) enable support for using the acrylic material in an unfocused window (#15923) (#15944) (thanks @Jaswir!)
  • Set useAcrylic to true in {profile}.unfocusedAppearance
  • You can turn unfocused acrylic off globally with the global setting compatibility.enableUnfocusedAcrylic (boolean, default false)
• Themes can now indicate whether tab icons should be shown in color or monochrome or hidden entirely (#15948) (thanks @bundgaard!)
  • Set {theme}.tab.iconStyle (enum default, hidden, monochrome; default default (default))

Changes

• wt -- foo will once again inherit the environment from its parent (#15897)
  • You can customize this behavior with wt --inheritEnvironment or wt --reloadEnvironment on a per-tab/per-pane basis.
  • You can also override this behavior with the profile setting {profile}.compatibility.reloadEnvironmentVariables (boolean, default true)
• We have rewritten "cooked read", the input line used by Command Prompt, Python, and a whole host of other applications (#15930) (#15780) (#15782) (#15783) (#15880)
  • This includes changes to command history, popups (F7 and the like), and how input is echoed to the display.
  • This may have a wide-ranging impact, so please file any unexpected input issues in Win32 applications!
• Input event record handling has been rewritten to support wide encodings like UTF-8, to be more maintainable, and to be much simpler to read (#15671) (#15606) (#15605) (#15611) (#15673) (#15672)
• Console applications can now more reliably print characters composed of surrogate pairs (aka "We've been trying to reach you about your WriteCharsLegacy's extended Emoji support") (#15567)
• We've added an action that opens the about dialog (openAbout) (#15990)