Microsoft’s Building its own Terminal for Windows 10, Adding Features to Windows Subsystem for Linux

With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft made several fundamental changes to how the company thinks about its own platform as well as the needs of its users. One of the biggest additions with Windows 10 was the introduction of the Subsystem for Linux and announced at Build today, the company is going to deliver a first-party terminal.

Appropriately called Windows Terminal, this new tool will bring to Windows a new environment for users of PowerShell, Cmd, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and all forms of command-line application to interact with their applications and platforms.

Windows Terminal will support emoji-rich fonts and graphics-processing-unit-accelerated text rendering. Further, it will also enable multiple tab support as well as theming and customization, allowing users to personalize their Terminal.

Yes, you read that correctly, even though Microsoft is not releasing Sets anytime soon, the new Windows Terminal will support a tabbed interface. But you will have to wait a little bit to play with the new tool as it will arrive in June for testing.

In addition to Windows Terminal, Microsoft is also announcing updates for Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 that brings with it significant speed improvements and that WSL now supports running Linux Docker containers.

With the addition of Terminal and the updates to the Subsystem for Linux, Windows is pushing further down the road of working to replace the need to boot into a Linux distro for tools that developers often prefer. Is Windows better than a native install of your favorite *nix install? Not yet, but it’s getting a lot closer.