Microsoft releases Windows Terminal 1.21 and 1.22 preview, the largest updates to date

Microsoft has released two updates for Windows Terminal, its universal command-line application for Windows 10 and 11. Version 1.21 is now available as a public release, while 1.22 is out for those testing preview versions. Both releases pack many new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

Here are the update highlights for Windows Terminal 1.21:

• Terminal will now remember what was on your screen when you exit, and can restore it if you'd like!
• You can specify multiple active fonts, which will be used in order.
• Box and line drawing glyphs are now rendered pixel-perfect with appropriate stippled shading
• We've rewritten the IME (input method editor) integration to make life much easier for those of you who need to input Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and more
• Scrollbar marks are finally generally available!
• We will now show and highlight all search results at the same time when you search.
• The old text rendering engine has been removed.

And here are the new features in Windows Terminal 1.22 Preview, which, according to developers, is the largest Windows Terminal release to date, with major changes like a new console hosting infrastructure, Sixels support (a bitmap graphics format for terminals), and a lot more:

• Terminal and conhost now support Sixels!
• We have rewritten how hosted console applications are translated for Windows Terminal (and other ConPTY consumers) to be based on direct API->VT translation rather than "rendering" a point-in-time snapshot of the display. This should result in improved throughput, reliability, correctness, plus an ability for applications to send unmodified VT directly to the terminal, but may result in some compatibility issues. Please file any issues you encounter with console applications.
  • ... terminals which support DEC rectangular operations DECCRA and DECFRA should see higher fidelity app-based scrolling
• We now support a much wider range of Unicode, including Emoji with ZWJ, combining characters, flag sequences, and anything else that requires proper Grapheme Clusters! Applications can query support for grapheme clusters with DECRPM 2027, and users can now configure whether Unicode is measured like the vintage Windows Console, like Linux and macOS terminals using wcwidth, or with Grapheme Clusters like Contour and other modern terminal emulators. Global setting compatibility.textMeasurement (enum console, wcswidth, graphemes (default))
• For the first time in decades, we've changed the popup UI (used for F7 and friends) in CMD! It now draws beneath the prompt (pushing the screen up) and has a modern TUI scrollbar if it doesn't all fit on the screen.
• Terminal will now offer relevant packages from WinGet if you're running CMD on Windows 24H2 and run a nonexistent command
• You can now add actions like splitPane and sendInput: foo and quit directly to the New Tab dropdown menu!
• You can now open a pane containing snippets (any sendInput actions!) with the openSnippets action! You can quickly access any commands you've saved in your JSON file, or with the new x-save command, and replay them with a new slick UI
  • ... snippets which can also be loaded from a .wt.json file in your current working directory (we're still working on docs, please stay tuned!)
  • ... snippets which can also be saved directly from the command line with wt x-save "text to save" with additional fixes
• Ctrl+Shift+Period will now open the "quick actions" flyout, which contains snippets and suggestions. You can now also bind the quickFix action to open a menu containing only WinGet suggestions (as of today, on Windows 24H2)
• You can now search with regular expressions in Terminal (and conhost!)

You can check out full release notes for both Terminal 1.21 and Terminal 1.22 Preview on the Releases page on GitHub.

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