What you need to know
- Windows Terminal hits 1.0 release.
- Linux GUI apps now also supported.
Last year, Microsoft announced that it was working on an open-source terminal app for Windows 10 with support for multiple command line executables, including PowerShell, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and Azure Cloud Shell. Today, Microsoft is announcing that Windows Terminal is now ready for enterprise use with its 1.0 release.
Windows Terminal is available today from both the Microsoft Store and GitHub. Unlike the traditional Command Prompt and PowerShell, Windows Terminal is a modern app with unicode and UTF-8 character support, GPU accelerated text rendering, custom themes, and can run Linux GUI apps directly.
Alongside the release of Windows Terminal is a new Windows Package Manager for developers that will make it easy for developers to set up their work environments with a command line interface like Windows Terminal. The Windows Package manager will let developers use scripts to install tools quickly and easily from an open-source repository hosted on GitHub.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is also getting some updates, including the following:
- Added support for graphics processing unit (GPU) compute workflows allows Linux tools to leverage GPUs to enable hardware acceleration for many development scenarios, such as parallel computation and training machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models. DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux alongside NVIDIA CUDA acceleration and more.
- Support for Linux graphical user interface (GUI) apps will enable you to open a WSL instance and run a Linux GUI app directly without the need for a third-party X server. This will help you to run your favorite apps in a Linux environment such as an integrated development environment (IDE).
- WSL will soon support a simplified install experience by running the command 'wsl.exe – install,' which will make it easier than ever to start using Linux apps on Windows.
What are your thoughts on Windows Terminal for Windows 10? Let us know in the comments.
The Windows Terminal is a modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL.
