microsoft/terminal

Welcome to the Windows Terminal, Console and Command-Line repo

Table of Contents

• Installing and running Windows Terminal
  • Microsoft Store [Recommended]
  • Other install methods
    • Via GitHub
    • Via Windows Package Manager CLI (aka winget)
    • Via Chocolatey (unofficial)
    • Via Scoop (unofficial)
• Installing Windows Terminal Canary
• Terminal & Console Overview
  • Windows Terminal
  • The Windows Console Host
  • Shared Components
  • Creating the new Windows Terminal
• Resources
• FAQ
  • I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console
• Documentation
• Contributing
• Communicating with the Team
• Developer Guidance
• Prerequisites
• Building the Code
  • Building in PowerShell
  • Building in Cmd
• Running & Debugging
  • Coding Guidance
• Code of Conduct

This repository contains the source code for:

• Windows Terminal
• Windows Terminal Preview
• The Windows console host (conhost.exe)
• Components shared between the two projects
• ColorTool
• Sample projects that show how to consume the Windows Console APIs

Related repositories include:

• Windows Terminal Documentation (Repo: Contribute to the docs)
• Console API Documentation
• Cascadia Code Font

Installing and running Windows Terminal

[!NOTE] Windows Terminal requires Windows 10 2004 (build 19041) or later

Microsoft Store [Recommended]

Install the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store. This allows you to always be on the latest version when we release new builds with automatic upgrades.

This is our preferred method.

Other install methods

Via GitHub

For users who are unable to install Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store, released builds can be manually downloaded from this repository's Releases page.

Download the Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_<versionNumber>.msixbundle file from the Assets section. To install the app, you can simply double-click on the .msixbundle file, and the app installer should automatically run. If that fails for any reason, you can try the following command at a PowerShell prompt:

# NOTE: If you are using PowerShell 7+, please run
# Import-Module Appx -UseWindowsPowerShell
# before using Add-AppxPackage.

Add-AppxPackage Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_<versionNumber>.msixbundle

[!NOTE] If you install Terminal manually:

• You may need to install the VC++ v14 Desktop Framework Package. This should only be necessary on older builds of Windows 10 and only if you get an error about missing framework packages.
• Terminal will not auto-update when new builds are released so you will need to regularly install the latest Terminal release to receive all the latest fixes and improvements!

Via Windows Package Manager CLI (aka winget)

winget users can download and install the latest Terminal release by installing the Microsoft.WindowsTerminal package:

winget install --id Microsoft.WindowsTerminal -e

[!NOTE] Dependency support is available in WinGet version 1.6.2631 or later. To install the Terminal stable release 1.18 or later, please make sure you have the updated version of the WinGet client.

Via Chocolatey (unofficial)

Chocolatey users can download and install the latest Terminal release by installing the microsoft-windows-terminal package:

choco install microsoft-windows-terminal

To upgrade Windows Terminal using Chocolatey, run the following:

choco upgrade microsoft-windows-terminal

If you have any issues when installing/upgrading the package please go to the Windows Terminal package page and follow the Chocolatey triage process

Via Scoop (unofficial)

Scoop users can download and install the latest Terminal release by installing the windows-terminal package:

scoop bucket add extras
scoop install windows-terminal

To update Windows Terminal using Scoop, run the following:

scoop update windows-terminal

If you have any issues when installing/updating the package, please search for or report the same on the issues page of Scoop Extras bucket repository.

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Installing Windows Terminal Canary

Windows Terminal Canary is a nightly build of Windows Terminal. This build has the latest code from our main branch, giving you an opportunity to try features before they make it to Windows Terminal Preview.

Windows Terminal Canary is our least stable offering, so you may discover bugs before we have had a chance to find them.

Windows Terminal Canary is available as an App Installer distribution and a Portable ZIP distribution.

The App Installer distribution supports automatic updates. Due to platform limitations, this installer only works on Windows 11.

The Portable ZIP distribution is a portable application. It will not automatically update and will not automatically check for updates. This portable ZIP distribution works on Windows 10 (19041+) and Windows 11.

Learn more about the types of Windows Terminal distributions.

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Terminal & Console Overview

Please take a few minutes to review the overview below before diving into the code:

Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users. It includes many of the features most frequently requested by the Windows command-line community including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming & styling, and more.

The Terminal will also need to meet our goals and measures to ensure it remains fast and efficient, and doesn't consume vast amounts of memory or power.

The Windows Console Host

The Windows Console host, conhost.exe, is Windows' original command-line user experience. It also hosts Windows' command-line infrastructure and the Windows Console API server, input engine, rendering engine, user preferences, etc. The console host code in this repository is the actual source from which the conhost.exe in Windows itself is built.

Since taking ownership of the Windows command-line in 2014, the team added several new features to the Console, including background transparency, line-based selection, support for ANSI / Virtual Terminal sequences, 24-bit color, a Pseudoconsole ("ConPTY"), and more.

However, because Windows Console's primary goal is to maintain backward compatibility, we have been unable to add many of the features the community (and the team) have been wanting for the last several years including tabs, unicode text, and emoji.

These limitations led us to create the new Windows Terminal.

You can read more about the evolution of the command-line in general, and the Windows command-line specifically in this accompanying series of blog posts on the Command-Line team's blog.

Shared Components

While overhauling Windows Console, we modernized its codebase considerably, cleanly separating logical entities into modules and classes, introduced some key extensibility points, replaced several old, home-grown collections and containers with safer, more efficient STL containers, and made the code simpler and safer by using Microsoft's Windows Implementation Libraries - WIL.

This overhaul resulted in several of Console's key components being available for re-use in any terminal implementation on Windows. These components include a new DirectWrite-based text layout and rendering engine, a text buffer capable of storing both UTF-16 and UTF-8, a VT parser/emitter, and more.

Creating the new Windows Terminal

When we started planning the new Windows Terminal application, we explored and evaluated several approaches and technology stacks. We ultimately decided that our goals would be best met by continuing our investment in our C++ codebase, which would allow us to reuse several of the aforementioned modernized components in both the existing Console and the new Terminal. Further, we realized that this would allow us to build much of the Terminal's core itself as a reusable UI control that others can incorporate into their own applications.

The result of this work is contained within this repo and delivered as the Windows Terminal application you can download from the Microsoft Store, or directly from this repo's releases.

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Resources

For more information about Windows Terminal, you may find some of these resources useful and interesting:

• Command-Line Blog
• Command-Line Backgrounder Blog Series
• Windows Terminal Launch: Terminal "Sizzle Video"
• Windows Terminal Launch: Build 2019 Session
• Run As Radio: Show 645 - Windows Terminal with Richard Turner
• Azure DevOps Podcast: Episode 54 - Kayla Cinnamon and Rich Turner on DevOps on the Windows Terminal
• Microsoft Ignite 2019 Session: The Modern Windows Command Line: Windows Terminal - BRK3321

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FAQ

I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console

Cause: You're launching the incorrect solution in Visual Studio.

Solution: Make sure you're building & deploying the CascadiaPackage project in Visual Studio.

[!NOTE] OpenConsole.exe is just a locally-built conhost.exe, the classic Windows Console that hosts Windows' command-line infrastructure. OpenConsole is used by Windows Terminal to connect to and communicate with command-line applications (via ConPty).

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Documentation

All project documentation is located at aka.ms/terminal-docs. If you would like to contribute to the documentation, please submit a pull request on the Windows Terminal Documentation repo.

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Contributing

We are excited to work alongside you, our amazing community, to build and enhance Windows Terminal!

BEFORE you start work on a feature/fix, please read & follow our Contributor's Guide to help avoid any wasted or duplicate effort.

Communicating with the Team

The easiest way to communicate with the team is via GitHub issues.

Please file new issues, feature requests and suggestions, but DO search for similar open/closed preexisting issues before creating a new issue.

If you would like to ask a question that you feel doesn't warrant an issue (yet), please reach out to us via Twitter:

• Christopher Nguyen, Product Manager: @nguyen_dows
• Dustin Howett, Engineering Lead: @dhowett
• Mike Griese, Senior Developer: @[email protected]
• Carlos Zamora, Developer: @cazamor_msft
• Pankaj Bhojwani, Developer
• Leonard Hecker, Developer: @LeonardHecker

Developer Guidance

Prerequisites

You can configure your environment to build Terminal in one of two ways:

Using WinGet configuration file

After cloning the repository, you can use a WinGet configuration file to set up your environment. The default configuration file installs Visual Studio 2026 Community & rest of the required tools. There are two other variants of the configuration file available in the .config directory for Enterprise & Professional editions of Visual Studio 2026. To run the default configuration file, you can either double-click the file from explorer or run the following command:

winget configure .config\configuration.winget

Manual configuration

• You must be running Windows 10 2004 (build >= 10.0.19041.0) or later to run Windows Terminal
• You must enable Developer Mode in the Windows Settings app to locally install and run Windows Terminal
• You must have PowerShell 7 or later installed
• You must have the Windows 11 (10.0.26100) SDK installed at version 10.0.26100.8249 or greater.
• You must have at least VS 2026 version 18.6 installed
• You must install the following Workloads via the VS Installer. Note: Opening the solution will prompt you to install missing components automatically:
  • Desktop Development with C++
  • WinUI application development
• You must install the .NET Framework 4.7.2 Targeting Pack to build test projects

Building the Code

OpenConsole.slnx may be built from within Visual Studio or from the command-line using a set of convenience scripts & tools in the /tools directory:

Building in PowerShell

Import-Module .\tools\OpenConsole.psm1
Set-MsBuildDevEnvironment
Invoke-OpenConsoleBuild

Building in Cmd

.\tools\razzle.cmd
bcz

Running & Debugging

To debug the Windows Terminal in VS, right click on CascadiaPackage (in the Solution Explorer) and go to properties. In the Debug menu, change "Application process" and "Background task process" to "Native Only".

You should then be able to build & debug the Terminal project by hitting F5. Make sure to select either the "x64" or the "x86" platform - the Terminal doesn't build for "Any Cpu" (because the Terminal is a C++ application, not a C# one).

👉 You will not be able to launch the Terminal directly by running the WindowsTerminal.exe. For more details on why, see #926, #4043

Coding Guidance

Please review these brief docs below about our coding practices.

👉 If you find something missing from these docs, feel free to contribute to any of our documentation files anywhere in the repository (or write some new ones!)

This is a work in progress as we learn what we'll need to provide people in order to be effective contributors to our project.

• Coding Style
• Code Organization
• Exceptions in our legacy codebase
• Helpful smart pointers and macros for interfacing with Windows in WIL

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Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.