Microsoft will set Windows Terminal as the default command line in Windows 11, as announced by the software giant, in an expected movement that comes after another imposed such as the one that involved its installation as system software also in Windows 10H2.
Microsoft explains in its blog what a measure that will be specified in the Windows 11 updates to be published in 2022, probably after the launch of Windows Terminal functions scheduled for January: «A default terminal assumes that it will start by default when opening a command line application. Since the dawn of Windows, the default terminal emulator has always been the Windows Host Console, conhost.exe. This means that shells like Command Prompt and PowerShell have always been opened within the Windows console host«.
For a long time, the company continues to explain, users have not been able to easily replace the console host. «There were definitely third parties that hooked up the operating system to make it possible, but it was never really supported. Now, we are opening up the functionality to allow other terminals to be set as default, including Windows Terminal«.
Windows Terminal
For those who do not know it, remember that it was the great bomb of BUILD 2019, as a new command line tool developed externally to Windows, released as free and open source and with a ‘Linux flavor’ well recognizable from its very name.
And it is that the Windows console ‘also exists’ and is an excellent option for medium / advanced users and administrators to perform tasks in the operating system more flexibly and quickly. Taking into account that this tool has the ability to use the rest of the developments of its kind present in Windows, setting it as the default in Windows 11 was something natural that had been talked about almost since its announcement.
Windows Terminal can handle both the symbol of the system (the basic interpreter used as of Windows NT) as PowerShell, the advanced console released by Windows Vista and which, in addition to the command prompt capabilities, offers a greater number of possibilities as it allows you to create your own commands and scripts using the C # programming language.
Last but not least, you can also run separate tabs to WSL 2, the second generation of the Linux subsystem for Windows that Microsoft announced at the same time as Windows Terminal, created to run Linux distributions and applications within Windows. Although Microsoft has no plans to remove individual applications, Windows Terminal will be the ultimate command line tool, and as we said in its day, the default console in Windows.
We like Windows Terminal. Well conceived and developed, free and open source, it is inspired by Linux even in its very name and this is a great starting point as a reunifier of Windows command interpreters. The latest version v1.12.3472.0 is available from the Microsoft Store and on GitHub (where the source code is also included) as a standalone application and is also installed as system software on Windows 10 21H2 and Windows 11.
