Windows users have missed out on a fully featured terminal program built into the OS for years. Command Prompt was used as an alternative and while it has served people well for years Windows 10 put more of emphasis on the Windows PowerShell. They even went as far as to replace the right-click context menu option with PowerShell instead of the Command Prompt with Windows 10. Today, Microsoft has announced a new command line program called Windows Terminal with the goal of it being the central location for accessing these types of command line programs.
Google I/O 2019 will be happening later this week, but Microsoft's Build 2019 developer conference is happening right now. Today, the Seattle-based technology giant announced a number of new tools for developers who use Windows including Windows Terminal, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2, XAML Islands, React Native for Windows, and MSIX Core. Windows Terminal has received a lot of attention since it was announced and it is currently available as a preview right now.
The user interface of Windows Terminal from Microsoft offers GPU-accelerated text rendering, theming support, tabs, tear-away windows, shortcuts, full Unicode support, including East Asian fonts, and more. Windows Terminal will see a wider release in June (as of its current schedule) and is meant for users of PowerShell, Cmd, WSL, and other command-line applications. WSL2 was also announced today and is said to be based on a Linux 4.19 kernel, which is shipped with the latest Windows build. We're told the kernel uses tech built specifically for Azure and should help to reduce Linux boot time while also streamlining memory use.
Microsoft has even gone as far as to promise twice the speed for WSL2 when it comes to file-system heavy operations. The new update to WSL will also support running Linux Docker containers natively too, which is huge news. You will no longer have to run VMs in order to run a Docker container. WSL2 is also slated for a June release date as well.