Windows Terminal 1.14 and Terminal Preview 1.15 brings several crash fixes

Microsoft has released new Windows Terminal updates for both its Stable channel as well as pre-release Preview channel. The latest Stable update is Windows Terminal v1.14.186 and it brings over the fixes from the previous Preview channel release. This means the new Stable update has fixes for several crash issues and more. Microsoft notes here that the text rendering engine is not available in this update.

Here is the full changelog for Windows Terminal v1.14.186 Stable channel release:

• Terminal now has better support for xterm's "Alternate Screen Buffer"

• Console application windowing will now work more consistently within Terminal: when an application requests that it be hidden or minimized, we will minimize the associated terminal window.

• Terminal can now pass xterm focus events on to connected client applications

• We've added a new experimental setting,

  experimental.useBackgroundImageForWindow

  , that lets you use one image as the background for any number of panes (thanks @nico-abram!)

   

• You can now change the bell sound with the profile.bellSound setting

   

Here are the bug fixes:

• Keyboard selection now works better with copyOnSelect (#13360)
• Keyboard selection is now limited to the scrollable area (#13353) (#13372)
• "Open settings file" commands now explicitly mention "JSON" for easier searching (#13265)
• An accelerator key is now defined for the "Open in Terminal" shell extension (#13080) (thanks @ianjoneill!)
• We no longer crash when using the Default Terminal setting in the settings UI (#13160)
• The Default Terminal banner is now hidden if you opened a session via default terminal (#13344)
• [O is no longer output erroneously from focus events for clients of libuv like neovim (#13260)
• We no longer crash when a screen reader is reading from a CLI app using the alt buffer (#13250)
• Deleting the last profile in the settings UI no longer causes a crash (#13242)
• Opening Windows Terminal via the Win+X menu no longer occasionally crashes (#13212)
• The "Open in Terminal" shell extension is now hidden when accessing a non-filesystem path like "Quick Actions" (#13206) (thanks @leejy12!)
• Clearing the screen via cls or Clear-Host won't leave behind an erroneous line of text (#13324) (thanks @j4james!)
• Default Terminal sessions now properly pass focus events when opened (#13247)
• Terminal will now use Unicode 14.0 to determine the width of some Unicode characters (#13292)
• We will no longer try to launch wsl to ask it to tell us about distributions when it's obvious that you don't have any (#13436)
• We've fixed a minor race condition in default terminal handoff that impacted nobody (#13410)
• The tab's context menu now has "Find" as an option (#13055) (thanks @Predelnik!)
• SetConsoleWindowInfo can no longer crash a terminal tab (#13212)
• An occasional crash while opening the settings UI has been stomped out (#13160)

Moving over to the Preview side, Microsoft has released today Windows Terminal Preview v1.15.186. The new update brings full keyboard selection support as well as experimental support for scrollbar marks. Here is the very long list of changes in the latest Terminal Preview:

Features:

• Selecting text in the terminal just got better!

   

  • Use the "markMode" action to enter mark mode and create a selection at the cursor (#13053) (#13358)
    -This is bound to Ctrl+Shift+M by default. Be sure to try it out!

  • Selections made with the keyboard now display a selection marker UI (#10865)

  • Use the "switchSelectionEndpoint" action to switch which endpoint you are moving in a selection (#13370)

  • Use the "toggleBlockSelection" action to transform your existing selection into a block selection (#13219)

     

• [Experimental] We now support scrollbar marks! (#12948) (#13163) (#13291) (#13414)

   

  • Use the "addMark" action to add a scrollbar mark

  • The color optional parameter can be used to specify a color

  • Use the "scrollToMark" action with a specified direction parameter to scroll between the marks

  • Use the "clearMark" action to remove a selected mark

  • Use the "clearAllMarks" action to remove all scrollbar marks

  • The "experimental.autoMarkPrompts" global setting can be set to true to automatically mark each prompt
    - NOTE: This uses the FTCS_PROMPT sequence from FinalTerm, OSC 133 ; A, which we now support! (#13163)

  • The "experimental.showMarksOnScrollbar" global setting can also be set to true to display the marks on your scrollbar

     

• If you're new to Windows Terminal Preview, but already have Windows Terminal installed and customized, we now migrate your settings over (#12907) (thanks @huiyooumich!)

   

• The tab's context menu now has "Find" as an option (#13055) (thanks @Predelnik!)

   

Changes:

• "Open settings file" commands now explicitly mention "JSON" for easier searching (#13265)
• Color schemes now support "purple" and "magenta" interchangeably in the JSON (#13261) (thanks @matthewd673!)
• An accelerator key is now defined for the "Open in Terminal" shell extension (#13080) (thanks @ianjoneill!)
• The settings UI's "Save" pane now aligns with the "Open JSON file" footer (#13282) (thanks @HO-COOH!)
• The Default Terminal setting in settings UI now has a "Let Windows decide" option (#13160)
  • An occasional crash while opening the settings UI has been stomped out (same PR!)
• The "Save" and "Discard changes" buttons were reordered in the settings UI to more closely follow the Windows UI guidelines (#13237)
• @dansmor7 has refined how colored tabs look when they're out of focus or hovered (#13434) (thanks!)

More Escape Sequences and expanded VT support

Courtesy of @j4james:

• Applications can now use DECCTR to alter the terminal's color scheme (#13139) (#13227)
• The same applications can now use DECAC to assign a color to the default foreground and background colors, as well as change the tab background color (#13058)
• Other applications can now use DECPS to play a basic sequence of musical notes (#13208)
  - This feature is preview-only until we can make sure the MIDI sound font is available everywhere Stable ships.

Documentation

• building.md and mouseInput.cpp got cleaned up a bit (#13333) (thanks @ofek and @oferze!)
• We added a Gannt chart to the roadmap (#13234)

On the back end...

• @lhecker rewrote how we handle coordinates across the project, paving the way for a longer scrollback history and removing a bunch of sources of assertion failures; if you see anything weird that seems like a coordinate system issue, please file it! (#13025)

Bug Fixes

• We no longer suppress black blackground or gray foreground for PowerShell (#13352)
  • We have chosen to remove this workaround as newer versions of PowerShell's PSReadline component contain a fix for the issue.
  • This was a compatibility band-aid that was impacting the capabilities of great projects such as Oh My Posh.
  • ❗ If you see unexpected black backgrounds appearing behind text while typing a command in PowerShell, make sure your PSReadline version is up to date. You can update your version of PSReadline by running the command, "Update-Module PSReadline".
• The Default Terminal banner is now hidden if you opened a session via default terminal (#13344)
  - AKA: We won't nag you to set Terminal as your default if it's demonstrably the default 😜
• [O is no longer output erroneously from focus events for clients of libuv like neovim (#13260)
• AtlasEngine no longer secretly increases the font size of HTML/RTF copies when the font changes (#13384)
• Keyboard selection is now limited to the scrollable area (#13318)
• The "Open in Terminal" shell extension is now hidden when accessing a non-filesystem path like "Quick Actions" (#13206) (thanks @leejy12!)
• Clearing the screen via cls or Clear-Host won't leave behind an erroneous line of text (#13324) (thanks @j4james!)
• Default Terminal sessions now properly pass focus events when opened (#13247)
• Terminal will now use Unicode 14.0 to determine the width of some Unicode characters (#13292)
• We will no longer try to launch wsl to ask it to tell us about distributions when it's obvious that you don't have any (#13436)
• We've fixed a minor race condition in default terminal handoff that impacted nobody (#13410)

Reliability

• We no longer crash when a screen reader is reading from a CLI app using the alt buffer (#13250) (#13244)
• Deleting the last profile in the settings UI no longer causes a crash (#13242)
• Opening Windows Terminal via the Win+X menu no longer occasionally crashes (#13212)
• SetConsoleWindowInfo can no longer crash a terminal tab (#13212)

Developers can find more details about the various features like Mark mode and Scroll bar marks in the official Microsoft blog post here.

Windows Terminal 1.14 and Terminal Preview 1.15 brings several crash fixes