Windows Terminal

Terminal (formerly "Windows Terminal") is a command line interpreter that serves as a modern replacement for the legacy Windows Console infrastructure.

It is capable of running any command-line app in separate tabs. It is preconfigured to run Command Prompt, PowerShell, WSL, SSH, and Azure Cloud Shell Connector, unifying all of the previously seperate command-line apps under one single app.

It comes with its own rendering back-end. Starting with version 1.11 on Windows 11, command-line apps can run on Windows Terminal instead of the Windows Console Host.

It was initially released in May 2019.

Starting with March 2022, the Windows Terminal has been split to feature a package for both Windows 10 and 11 and a separate exclusively for Windows 11. The latter always has a higher version number to make upgrades from the other package possible. Microsoft states "that it is impossible to have two bundles with the same version number, so it has to be this way."

History
Windows Terminal was announced at Microsoft's Build 2019 developer conference in May 2019 as a modern alternative for Windows Console, and Windows Terminal's source code first appeared on GitHub on 3 May 2019. The first preview release was version 0.2, which appeared on 10 July 2019. The first stable version of the project (version 1.0) was released on 19 May 2020, at which point, Microsoft started releasing preview versions as the Windows Terminal Preview app, which could be installed side-by-side with the stable version.