Windows Terminal Adds Advanced Tab Switcher, Command Palette

Windows Terminal Adds Advanced Tab Switcher, Command Palette

Microsoft released Windows Terminal Preview 1.3 with bug fixes, performance improvements, and long-awaited new features including a new command palette and an advanced tab switcher for navigating multiple tabs easier.

The open-source Windows Terminal app allows users to open multiple console tabs in the same window (with support for split view when needed), making it possible to choose between the Command Prompt, PowerShell, Azure Cloud Shell, and shells of Linux distros installed using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Windows Terminal was unveiled by Microsoft at the Build developer conference in May 2019 and officially launched two months later, in July.

New features

Windows Terminal Preview 1.3 provides users with a new way to switch tabs using an advanced tab switcher that can be enabled using the useTabSwitcher global setting.

To use the new tab switcher for switching to the next and previous tabs you have to hit the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab keyboard shortcuts.

The app now also comes with tab search which displays a search field when hitting CTRL+C that makes it simpler to find a specific tab if you have a long list of them.

This release also introduces the command palette, a feature similar to the one available in Visual Studio Code and designed to help you quickly search through the entire collection commands available in Windows Terminal.

To open the command palette you have to use the Ctrl+Shift+P keyboard shortcut, a key binding that can be changed via the settings.json file. 

Command palette works in action and command-line mode with the first listing all commands available by default.

To enter command-line mode you have to type > which lets you input and invoke wt commands in the currently active window.

“You can also customize actions you’d like to add to the command palette by adding commands to your settings.json file,” Microsoft Program Manager Kayla Cinnamon explained. “Your key bindings should automatically populate the command palette.”

Detailed documentation on how to include your own commands to the palette can be found on the Windows Terminal docs site.

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Changes

• Windows Terminal 1.3 ships with Cascadia Code v2008.25
• The bindings keyword in settings has been replaced with actions in preparation for improvements to the action
  binding experience
• All processes spawned under Terminal will be given a fresh new environment block
• Terminal is now a little more strict about parsing your settings, but it will now actually tell you why something couldn’t be understood
• Key bindings can now use the app or menu key

UI

• Clicking in the scrollbar track will now jump up/down by a whole screenful
• The color picker is now more visually consistent, having learned to round its buttons

Terminal Basics

• We now have very basic support for DCS sequences
• Underlines are now rendered consistent with the font’s metrics
• We now have support for SGR 21, doubly-underlined
• We now have support for SGR 9, crossed out
• Our underline/strikethrough renderer has been refactored to be easier to work with
• Our VT parser has been refactored to be easier to work with
• Scroll locking should now work more reliably when the scrollback is at maximum length

Bug Fixes

• The command palette now has a gutter so that it stops overlapping the scrollbar
• F7 will no longer not work after our “null scancode” change
• altGrAliasing: false will no longer actually break AltGr
• Profiles whose indices are greater than 9 will now properly display their shortcuts in the menu

Performance

• Miscellaneous performance improvements for handling incoming data:
  • “Set memory order on slow atomics”
  • “Commit attr runs less frequently by accumulating length of color run”
  • “Skip DX invalidation if we’ve already scrolled an entire screen worth of height”

A full list of all new features, changes, bug fixes, and improvements available in Windows Terminal Preview 1.3 can be found here.  

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