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New features in Windows Terminal Preview

Quick Shell

Article from ADMIN 67/2022

By Rainer W. Gerling

Windows Terminal Preview comes with interesting new features, such as state-preserving quick windows access via shortcuts and configuration of almost all settings in a GUI, which is reason enough to take a look at the preview.

You can pick up both the current version of Windows Terminal and Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store [1]. Alternatively, a manual install from GitHub [2] is also possible; make sure you choose the version with the highest release number. At the end of the description, you will find the Assets item, which you should expand if you do not see any file links there. A click on the line with the file name ending with msixbundle starts the download of the installation package – or the installation, depending on your browser settings. If you install from the Microsoft Store, the applications are updated automatically.

For this article, I looked at the Windows Terminal Preview, which at the time was version 1.10.1933.0 with the then current Stable version at 1.9.1942.0. Both the Preview and Stable versions can be used in parallel with separate settings.

Configuration (Almost) Without an Editor

One important innovation is the graphical interface for configuring the tool. It was already included in the current version, although with significantly reduced functionality. Most settings can be made in the graphical interface (Figure 1). Depending on the Preview version you use, some very detailed settings might still need to be edited directly in the JSON file. Whether this will change by the time the final 2.0 version is released remains to be seen. Note that the key names are localized if you change the interface language, but the JSON file always uses the English expressions.

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