We briefly paused our quarterly release cycle to focus on reliability and performance, but now we’re back with Windows Terminal 1.25!

We are also updating Windows Terminal stable to version 1.24, which will include all of the features from this previous blog post. Some notable features to call out are:

Additional language support in Command Palette, which will now additionally suggest features using English keywords if you natively speak another language.

A new Settings page dedicated to Extensions, which allows you to see what profiles, color schemes and actions have been added to your Terminal

Support for the “Synchronized Output” DEC private mode, which applications can use to reduce flickering and tearing.

You can install Windows Terminal and Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store, from the GitHub releases page, or by using WinGet. If you are interested in being at the forefront of our new features, you can also download Windows Terminal Canary from our GitHub repo.

Now, what’s 1.25 about?

Searching your Settings

We’re rolling out a new feature that allows you to search your settings! It includes all built-in settings, as well as any color schemes, profiles, extensions, items in the New Tab menu, Actions and more. Note that for some settings that can apply to any profile, those settings may appear more than once in the results.

Editing your Key Bindings

In our quest to bring more of the settings out of the JSON file and into the Settings UI, we’ve added a new editor for actions. You can configure exactly what “New Tab” does and create your new favorite, “Split Pane: WSL, Up, Down, Left, Right”.

Inputting your Inputs (better)

Windows Terminal now ships with built-in support for Kitty‘s Keyboard protocol, which allows commandline applications to disambiguate keys such as Esc from Ctrl+[ and receive information about which modifiers were pressed. This allows applications to receive Shift+Enter among other things, which should improve your interaction with some modern “agentic” command line tools.

Community Translations

Windows Terminal now comes with two community translations, Serbian (Cyrillic) and Ukrainian, thanks to @eevan78 and @psnet.

Miscellaneous improvements

You can now configure exactly how wide (okay, well, between one and two columns) Unicode characters marked as “Ambiguous” are. This will not change how they look, but it will change how much space they take up. Please note that this is a compatibility setting for applications written to run in a Chinese, Japanese or Korean console and may result in graphical artifacts for other applications. (Thanks @unagi!)

You can now configure Terminal to persist only the layout of your windows and none of the content

We have re-enabled build-time “guided” optimization, which should result in a 10-20% increase in I/O throughput!

Terminal now ships with the VS Code Modern Dark and Light color schemes, increasing consistency across our different projects.

wt -pos now supports single-argument inputs for position the window at a nice perfect square location (Thanks @KavishaHaswani!)

Bug fixes

Elevated and non-elevated Terminal windows will no longer blow away eachothers’ sessions

Terminal should no longer jump around frantically while you have an active search while printing output

The command palette entries “Move tab forward” and “… backward” now indicate whether that means left or right (Thanks @vamsiikrishnaak!)

Underlines will no longer render in the wrong color when you have an active text selection

When you enter “Mark Mode” while a search is active, we will now start with that result marked

When you enter “Mark Mode”, we will now start marking at the top of your scroll area rather than the top of the active viewport

Special thanks goes out to @fab-c14, @pszlazak, @stynixkis, @04suriya07-spec, @benediktjohannes and @Musaddiq625 for build fixes, code hygiene improvements, spell checking and more.

Top contributors

Terminal continues to improve with the help of our community. Here’s who especially made an impact in this release:

Contributors who opened the most non-duplicate issues

alabuzhev

benediktjohannes

0wwafa

Contributors who created the most merged pull requests

AvishekDas5

jakobarsement

benediktjohannes

Contributors who provided the most comments on pull requests

j4james

benediktjohannes

psnet

Cheers

We hope you enjoy the latest release of Windows Terminal! More information on these new features can be found on our docs site and if you find any bugs or have feature requests, feel free to file them on GitHub. If you have any questions you can reach out to Dustin (@DHowett) on Mastodon or your favorite fediverse client. See you next time!

The post Windows Terminal Preview 1.25 Release appeared first on Windows Command Line.

PowerToys 0.97 is here! This release packs in a ton of improvements to Command Palette, introduces a brand-new mouse utility called CursorWrap, expands CLI support across several utilities, and includes plenty of other refinements. Get the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or heading to the release page heading to the release page. Let’s dive in!

Command Palette gets a big update

We have been hard at work improving Command Palette, and this release is a big one! It introduces several new features, deeper customization options, and a long list of improvements across the board.

UI customization

There is a brand-new Personalization page that lets you customize the Command Palette UI to your liking. You can now pick a background image and apply color tinting to make Command Palette feel truly personal. To customize this setting, open Command Palette Settings => Personalization => Background

PR: #43505 (Thanks, @jiripolasek!)

Support for fallback ranking

To give you more control over how search results are ordered, we have added fallback ranking. You can manage fallback rankings from an extension’s settings page by clicking on Manage fallback order. Here, you can reorder commands here by dragging them to match your preferences.

PR: #43549

Control PowerToys directly from Command Palette

This was a big community request. A new built-in PowerToys extension now lets you control PowerToys features straight from Command Palette. You can toggle Light Switch, switch FancyZones layouts, pick a color, and more, all without leaving Command Palette. Just make sure the utilities you want to use are enabled in PowerToys settings. On top of that, you can now use Peek to preview files and folders within Command Palette!

PR: #44006

More Command Palette changes

• Support for Pinyin! To enable this, make sure your OS language is set to a supported Chinese variant.
• A new built-in Remote Desktop extension to quickly jump to your remote desktops.
• You can now select a custom search engine in the Web Search extension settings.
• Added drag and drop support. File Indexer and Clipboard History can now drag content from Command Palette into other apps, and extension developers can add this capability to their own extensions.

See the list below for all Command Palette changes!

Introducing CursorWrap

If you use multiple monitors and are tired of dragging your mouse all the way across the screen, CursorWrap is here to help. When enabled, your cursor wraps around the edges of the active monitor – moving past the top, bottom, left, or right edge instantly brings it back on the opposite side.

PR: #41826 (Thanks, @mikehall-ms!)

Quick Access flyout gets faster

We’ve undocked the Quick Access flyout from the main Settings process, which means it now launches faster. You can also choose to disable it entirely or assign a keyboard shortcut to open it. On top of that, the PowerToys system tray icon can now be set to a monochrome style if you prefer a subtler look that fits in with other system icons.

PR: #43840 and #33321 (Thanks, @HO-COOH!)

More CLI support across PowerToys

In the last release we added CLI support for Peek, and we’re expanding that even further. FancyZones, Image Resizer, and File Locksmith can now all be controlled from the command line. Whether you want to switch layouts, resize a batch of images, or unlock files, it’s all possible through the CLI. Be sure to check the docs for the full list of supported commands.

Other notable changes

• Light Switch can now follow Night Light. Just switch the mode in Settings.
• The “What’s new” dialog has been refreshed to make it easier to browse, with more detailed release notes going forward.
• Advanced Paste now previews HEX color values and supports image input for AI transformations.
• More improvements and fixes across the board: see the full release notes below.

Big thanks to the community

As always, a big thank-you to everyone who contributed — we couldn’t do this release without you! Thanks @artickc, @carlos-zamora, @crramirez, @daverayment, @DevLGuilherme, @erik-anderson, @fm-sys, @frg2089, @HO-COOH, @jiripolasek, @Memphizzz, @mikeclayton, @mikehall-ms, @noraa-junker, @pratnala, @RubenFricke, @ruslanlap, @safocl, @samrueby and @warquys for your pull requests!

What’s next?

For the next update, we’re focusing on a broad stability and bug-fix push, along with improvements to existing utilities like Keyboard Manager. Stay tuned!

We’re always happy to get your feedback and contributions – whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or a pull request. Head over to the PowerToys repo to jump in.

The full release notes can be found here.

Useful links

• PowerToys overview
• PowerToys GitHub repository
• PowerToys installation instructions

The post PowerToys 0.97 is here: a big Command Palette update and a new mouse utility appeared first on Windows Command Line.

We are back with a fresh PowerToys release! This month brings a redesigned Advanced Paste experience with support for multiple AI model endpoints, a wave of improvements to Command Palette, and plenty of smaller upgrades across the utility suite. Grab the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or heading to the release page. Let’s jump in!

Smarter, faster, and more flexible: Advanced Paste gets a big upgrade

We have been hard at work improving Advanced Paste. Both the Settings experience and the Advanced Paste UI have been refreshed with a cleaner, more modern design. A lot of you asked for more flexibility in choosing which AI models and endpoints you can use with Advanced Paste. We listened. You can now configure online endpoints from Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Gemini, and Mistral. Prefer local models? No problem. Advanced Paste now supports Foundry Local and Ollama, so you can keep your data on your device and take advantage of your hardware like the NPU. To get started, open the Advanced Paste Settings page and select Add endpoint. You can choose your provider and set things like API keys, endpoints, and model names directly in the dialog.

You can also configure more than one endpoint. This can be useful when different models work better for different types of clipboard content. With multiple endpoints set up, you can quickly switch between them when needed.

The new Advanced Paste window has gotten a revamp too! It now shows your current clipboard content (this can be disabled in Settings) and includes a model selection drop-down, making it easy to switch between your configured endpoints on the fly. It is quick, simple, and a lot more powerful!

PR: #41987

Polish and improvements for Command Palette

Command Palette has received a lot of small improvements and bug fixes in this release. The extensions overview in Settings now includes search, the labeling of built-in extensions has been simplified for a quieter experience, and you can choose whether the Command Palette window should reopen at its last position or re-center itself. It also remembers its last window size after a restart and we’ve fixed numerous bugs in some of the built-in extensions. Be sure to check out the full list of improvements in the release notes.

PowerRename gains image metadata support

Another long-standing request was for PowerRename to extract information from images when renaming files. We have added support for EXIF and XMP metadata, so when you select one or more image files, all available tags will appear in the regex flyout for you to use.

PR: #41987

Other notable changes

Light Switch

Since introducing Light Switch in the previous release, we have been working hard to improve its reliability and performance. This update also adds the ability to manually set your location for sunrise and sunset calculations. To use it, open the Light Switch settings, enable automatic mode, and select the location button. In the dialog, you can let Windows detect your location or enter your latitude and longitude manually.

Dashboard

We fixed several issues in the Settings dashboard and added a new option to sort the list of toggles alphabetically or by status.

ZoomIt

Zooming in ZoomIt is now smoother, and we have added support for recording your screen and exporting it as a GIF.

And much more

Check out the complete list of changes in the release notes.

Big thanks to the community

As always, a big thank-you to everyone who contributed — we couldn’t do this release without you! Thanks @daverayment, @lzandman, @jiripolasek, @samrueby, @DevLGuilherme, @Lee-WonJun, @davidegiacometti, @mikehall-ms, @MasonBergstrom, @prochan2, @trevorNgo, @anselumjuju, @foxmsft, @MarioHewardt and @snickler for your pull requests!

What’s next?

We are taking a little more time for our next iteration and plan to release version 0.97 in January. This gives us extra room to focus on stability, performance improvements, and bug fixes across the suite. We are also working on fallback sorting in Command Palette, a refreshed Keyboard Manager experience, a new Shortcut Guide and much more. Stay tuned!

We’re always happy to get your feedback and contributions – whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or a pull request. Head over to the PowerToys repo to jump in.

The full release notes can be found here.

Useful links

• PowerToys overview
• PowerToys GitHub repository
• PowerToys installation instructions

The post PowerToys 0.96 is here: endpoints for Advanced Paste, metadata support for PowerRename and more! appeared first on Windows Command Line.

New month, new release! This one’s packed with quality-of-life improvements, performance boosts, and a bunch of long-standing community requests finally checked off the list — all while keeping the focus on fundamentals like speed and reliability! Get the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or heading to the release page. Let’s dive in!

Automatically switch between light and dark-mode with Light Switch

Meet Light Switch, a brand-new utility that automatically switches your PC between light and dark mode! You can set custom start and end times, or let Light Switch handle it for you by using the sunrise and sunset times for your location. Want it to start a little earlier or later? Just tweak the offset to your liking. You can also choose whether the shell, apps, or both should switch – and, in case you want to toggle on the fly; just configure a keyboard shortcut

PR: #41987

Command Palette goes brrr

We’ve heard you — you want Command Palette to find things faster than ever. This release brings a brand-new fuzzy matcher with smarter fallbacks that makes search results both faster and more relevant.

Under the hood, we’ve made several key improvements:

• Removed ranking for fallback extensions (except Calculator and Run), so they now appear at the bottom of results.
• Fixed an issue where Command Palette was throwing a lot of exceptions during searches — especially when multiple extensions were installed. This was throttling performance quite a bit.
• Added logic to cancel previous searches when you type something new, so only your latest query is processed.
• Limited app results in the All Apps extension to a default of 10 (configurable to 0, 1, 5, or 10).

Quick comparison of the fallback improvements:

Together, these changes make Command Palette feel snappier, more efficient, and way smoother to use. These aren’t lab-grade benchmarks, but here’s a peek at some real-world numbers our dev team gathered while testing search speed improvements:

Beyond performance, we’ve also polished up the experience with: * A new gallery/grid view for search results * An option to toggle animations on or off * Tons of bug fixes and small tweaks throughout.

PR: #41959

Peek with the Space bar

Another community favorite: you can now open Peek **by simply pressing the **Space bar — no more custom shortcut required! This is now the default behavior for Peek going forward.

PR: #41867

Find My Mouse now supports transparency

Another big community ask: you can now make the Find My Mouse highlight fully transparent. Just head to the Appearance section and adjust the transparency slider for the cursor color — great for when you want a subtler effect.

PR: #41701

Ignore shortcut conflicts and unassign shortcuts

Last release introduced shortcut conflict detection, and we’ve expanded on it this time. You can now ignore specific conflicts directly from the conflict dialog so they no longer show up as a conflict.

We’ve also added the option to completely unassign shortcuts in the configuration dialog using the Clear button. This makes it easy to remove shortcuts for any utilities you don’t use.

PR: #41729

Other notable changes

• Mouse Pointer Crosshairs now lets you show only the horizontal line, vertical line, or both.
• Added support for Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3, so it’s easier to setup a new device with the same settings.
• Gliding Cursor can now be canceled with the Esc key.
• Added a Welsh layout with acute, grave, and dieresis variants for vowels in Quick Accent.
• ZoomIt now supports smooth image zooming.

Big thanks to the community

A huge shoutout to Jiří Polášek (@jiripolasek) for contributing over 20 pull requests in this release! And of course, a big thank-you to everyone else who contributed — we couldn’t do it without you! Thanks @chakrik73, @daverayment, @DevLGuilherme, @foxmsft,, @michaeljolley, @mikeclayton, @mikehall-ms, @mKpwnz, @PesBandi and @samrueby for your pull requests!

What’s next?

We are planning some nice new features and improvements for the next releases – a revamped Keyboard Manager UI, custom endpoint and local model support for Advanced Paste, Commmand Palette improvements and a brand-new Shortcut Guide experience! Stay tuned!

We’re always happy to get your feedback and contributions – whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or a pull request. Head over to the PowerToys repo to jump in.

The full release notes can be found here.

Useful links

• PowerToys overview
• PowerToys GitHub repository
• PowerToys installation instructions

The post PowerToys 0.95 is here: new Light Switch utility, faster Command Palette, and Peek with Spacebar appeared first on Windows Command Line.

This release is all about quality-of-life improvements — making it easier to find the setting you’re looking for, spot shortcut conflicts, and even adding a new way to move your mouse cursor. Get the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or heading to the release page.

Search in Settings

PowerToys has grown a lot over the years, and with so many settings it can sometimes be hard to find exactly what you need. That’s why we’ve added a search box in Settings. Search supports fuzzy matching, so you don’t need to type the exact name. Just press Ctrl+F (or click the search box) and start typing. Suggestions show up right in the flyout, and selecting one takes you straight to the right settings page. Got more than five results? Hit the Show all results button to view everything in the full search page.

PR: #41285

Shortcut conflicts

Ever used a hotkey and had two things happen at once? With so many shortcuts in PowerToys, it’s easy to run into conflicts. Now, shortcuts that are already in use (either by another module or by Windows itself) will be marked in red. On the new shortcut conflicts tile on the home dashboard, you’ll also see how many conflicts you currently have. Clicking the tile gives you a full overview and lets you quickly reassign shortcuts so everything works the way you want.

PR: #41029

Mouse Pointer Crosshairs now includes a new gliding cursor mode

With this feature, you can control the mouse cursor using just a single shortcut. Instead of needing to quickly stop the cursor right on target, the gliding cursor lets you move step by step with more control. This is especially helpful as an accessibility feature for people who find fast or precise mouse movements challenging. It’s similar to switch access features found on other platforms, and makes it possible to use Windows with just a single button. Once you trigger the shortcut, the crosshairs begin to glide. Pressing the shortcut again locks the horizontal position, then the vertical, and finally performs the click.

PR: #41221

Other improvements:

• Upgraded the installer from WiX3 to WiX5 for improved security and reliability.
• Quick Accent now supports Maltese, and frequently used accents appear first (and are remembered across sessions).
• Win10 context menu modules now use runtime registration, with proper cleanup on uninstall to avoid stale entries.
• Hosts Editor now has a “No leading spaces” option so active host entries can start at column 0 even if others are disabled.
• Tons of bug fixes and improvements for Command Palette, including visual updates and new support for filters on ListPages (handy for extension developers).

What’s next for v0.95?

We are planning some nice new features and improvements for next month – a revamped Keyboard Manager UI, and a new utility that can automatically switch between light and dark mode based on your schedule! Stay tuned!

We’re always happy to get your feedback and contributions – whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or a pull request. Head over to the PowerToys repo to jump in.

The full release notes can be found here.

/ Niels

The post PowerToys 0.94 is here: Settings search, shortcut conflict detection and more! appeared first on Windows Command Line.

We’re back with another Terminal release for you! This development cycle, we focused on overall quality of life improvements and bug fixes.

We are also updating Windows Terminal stable to version 1.23, which will include all of the features from this previous blog post. Some notable features to call out are:

A completely new and more reliable windowing architecture, featuring a more robust tray icon, window actions, and “summoning” (i.e. Quake mode).

A new UI in settings for customizing your New Tab dropdown menu.

Additional settings that have been added to the settings UI that originally only existed in the depths of the settings.json file: bell sounds, compatibility, cell size customization, profile-specific foreground/background, a new spatial “padding” editor, an icon picker, and more.

Drag and drop path translation a.k.a. flipping your slashes to face the right way depending on the shell you’re using (amongst other formatting things).

You can install Windows Terminal and Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store, from the GitHub releases page, or by using winget. If you are interested in being at the forefront of our new features, you can also download Windows Terminal Canary from our GitHub repo.

Now without further ado, let’s get into what’s new! (Rhyme intended )

Command palette additional language support

If you have English and another language enabled on your machine, you can now search in both languages and the command palette will display both!

Settings enhancements

Extensions settings page

We’ve added a new Extensions page within the settings that allows you to view and toggle the sources for all of your profiles and color schemes.

Relative file paths

You can now use relative file paths for icons, background images, and pixel shader paths. These paths are relative to your settings file, whether you’re a user or a fragment author. If you’re interested in writing fragments, learn more about distributing media resources with a fragment extension!

Dimidium color scheme

Dimidium has been added as a new core color scheme, based on the CAM16 color model. (Thanks @dofuuz!)

Disable zoom and opacity shortcuts

You can now disable the Ctrl and Ctrl+Shift mouse wheel shortcuts to change the font size (zoom) and opacity of the terminal, respectively. (Thanks @paulinek13!)

Reset your settings

You can now reset to default settings and clear your cache within the Settings UI on the Compatibility page!

Broader snippet detection

Terminal will now read .wt.json files from parent directories to the one you are in. This allows you to use snippets that are defined in files that live in adjacent folders, giving you a broader set of actions to use when invoking the snippets pane or command palette.

SSH dynamic profiles

Using your ssh_config, Terminal will now try to automatically detect hosts you may SSH to often and generate a folder of quick access SSH profiles. (Thanks @jonthysell for your initial implementation!)

Context menu pane support

The right-click context menu now has more options to quick access splitting, moving, zooming, and closing panes! (Thanks @dm17ryk!)

Tip: You can enable the context menu with right-click in your profile settings on the Advanced page! Use the Defaults section if you want this to apply to all your profiles.

Miscellaneous improvements

The "matchProfiles" new tab menu entry now supports regular expressions (so you can match .*.WSL, for example!).

The command palette now uses the fuzzy searching algorithm popularized by fzf, making it feel way better! (Thanks @e82eric!)

The command palette will now display previews on hover for items that can be previewed, such as color schemes. (Thanks @eleadufresne!)

If your system is using “high contrast” mode, Terminal will now automatically turn on perceptual color nudging (unless you have disabled it completely). This setting is located at in the profiles section under Appearance titled “Automatically adjust lightness of indistinguishable text” and is enabled by default.

You can now configure an additional path translation mode, MinGW (mingw in JSON), which will map paths like C:\foo to C:/foo. (Thanks @abutcher-gh!)

Bug fixes

Dragging invalid paths onto Terminal with incorrectly-constructed DataObjects will no longer send your session into outer space. (Thanks @jamespack!)

Tab icons, close on exit state, and the bell settings will once again be reloaded when the settings file changes.

Terminal will no longer occasionally miss hard line breaks in full-screen applications such as tmux.

Turning “Use active terminal title as application title” (showTerminalTitleInTitlebarin JSON) on and off will no longer result in your window titles becoming stuck.

We have resolved a crash in context menu handling across multiple windows.

We will no longer try to render bidirectional text isolates LRI, RLI, FSI and PDI. (Thanks @adalinesimonian!)

WSL profiles containing local overrides for the PATH environment variable will no longer destroy the PATH inside WSL.

Terminal’s launch size now takes into account any custom cell width and height you may have specified. (Thanks @j4james!)

Special thanks goes out to @Maddimax, @mdanish-kh, @HO-COOH, @jsoref, @jamespack, @mohiuddin-khan-shiam, @chawyehsu, and @zwJimRaynor for build fixes, code hygiene improvements, spell checking and more.

Top contributors

Terminal continues to improve with the help of our community. Here’s who especially made an impact in this release:

Contributors who opened the most non-duplicate issues

vefatica

SaurabhNew

Darklocal

Contributors who created the most merged pull requests

j4james

aphistra

Techypanda

ReuelAlbert-Dev

mdanish-kh

jamespack

Blackspirits

Contributors who provided the most comments on pull requests

e82eric

jsoref

j4james

Cheers

We hope you enjoy this latest release of Windows Terminal! More information on these new features can be found on our docs site and if you find any bugs or have feature requests, feel free to file them on GitHub. If you have any questions you can reach out to Kayla (@kaylacinnamon) on Bluesky or (@cinnamon_msft) on X. See you next time!

The post Windows Terminal Preview 1.24 Release appeared first on Windows Command Line.

Hey PowerToys fans!

We’re back with a fresh release: PowerToys 0.93! As usual, we’ve squashed a bunch of bugs and made some small quality of life tweaks, but we’ve also packed in some bigger, exciting changes you’ll want to check out. Get the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or heading to the release page.

Command Palette – smaller, better, faster, stronger!

We’ve been hard at work with the community to iron out issues and speed things up. And wow… it’s paid off. By enabling Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation in the Windows App SDK, we successfully reduced the startup memory usage by 15%, load time by 40%, built-in extensions loading time by 70% and reducing the installation size by ~55%! Below, you can find the raw stats comparing 0.92 and 0.93:

PR: #40551

Additionally, we have closed over 99 issues for Command Palette. Some notable changes:

• Clipboard history is back!
• Keyboard shortcuts for context menus
• Pin your favorite apps
• History support for when using the run extension

Revamped dashboard UX in Settings

A lot of you told us the old dashboard was a bit tricky to navigate. It wasn’t always clear which utilities were on or off, and finding shortcuts wasn’t exactly quick and easy. So… we teamed up with the community and redesigned it. Think of it like the Windows 11 Settings homepage, but for PowerToys. We’ve separated quick launching, shortcuts, and utility toggles so they’re more glanceable and easier to find. Now you can see what’s on, what’s off, and what shortcuts you’ve got – all at a glance. And, you can quickly launch utilities right from the homepage!

PR: #40214

New Spotlight mode in Mouse Highlighter

Mouse Highlighter now has a brand-new Spotlight mode. By default, it draws an ellipse around your cursor – but with Spotlight mode, the entire screen dims, leaving only the area around your mouse highlighted. Perfect for screen sharing, recording, or whenever you want to direct attention to exactly where the action is. And of course, you’ve got full control over the dimming color and transparency.

Other changes

Alongside dozens of bug fixes and smaller improvements, we’ve been strengthening our engineering systems to speed up development and improve reliability:

• New configurable UI test pipeline that can use pre-built releases, cutting test time from over 2 hours to about 90 minutes.
• Shorter CI, fuzzing, and UI test timeouts — reduced from 4 hours to 90 minutes — for faster feedback loops.
• Broader UI test coverage for Command Palette, Advanced Paste, Peek, Text Extractor, and PowerRename.
• Updated and expanded developer documentation.

Community member spotlight

Big shout out to Jiří Polášek (@jiripolasek) who’s cranked out over 20 pull requests for this release! Seriously awesome work – and thanks for helping make PowerToys better for everyone!

Looking ahead

Up next in 0.94, we’re cooking up improvements for searching your Settings, giving Keyboard Manager some Fluent Design love and.. upgrading our installer! Stay tuned!

We’re always happy to get your feedback and contributions – whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or a pull request. Head over to the PowerToys repo to jump in.

The full release notes can be found here.

/ Niels

The post PowerToys 0.93 is here: faster Command Palette, new dashboard UX and more appeared first on Windows Command Line.

What is Edit?

Edit is a new command-line text editor in Windows. Edit is open source, so you can build the code or install the latest version from GitHub!

This CLI text editor will be available to preview in the Windows Insider Program in the coming months. After that, it will ship as part of Windows 11!

How to use Edit

Open Edit by running edit in the command line or running edit <your-file-name>. With this, you will be able to edit files directly in the command line without context switching.

What are Edit’s features?

Edit is still in an early stage, but it has several features out of the box. Here are some highlights!

Lightweight

Edit is a small, lightweight text editor. It is less than 250kB, which allows it to keep a small footprint in the Windows 11 image.

Mouse Mode Support

As a modeless editor with a Text User Interface (TUI), all the menu options in Edit have keybindings (which you can see next to the menu options).

Open Multiple Files

You can open multiple files in Edit and switch between them with Ctrl+P (or by clicking the file list on the lower-right).

Find & Replace

You can find and replace text with Ctrl+R or select Edit > Replace in the TUI menu. There is also Match Case and Regular Expression support as well.

Word Wrap

Edit supports word wrapping. To use Word Wrap, you can use Alt+Z or select View > Word Wrap on the TUI menu.

Why build another CLI editor?

What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows. 32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS editor, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox. From there, we narrowed down our options…

Many of you are probably familiar with the “How do I exit vim?” meme. While it is relatively simple to learn the magic exit incantation, it’s certainly not a coincidence that this often turns up as a stumbling block for new and old programmers.

Because we wanted to avoid this for a built-in default editor, we decided that we wanted a modeless editor for Windows (versus a modal editor where new users would have to remember different modes of operation and how to switch between them).

This unfortunately limited our choices to a list of editors that either had no first-party support for Windows or were too big to bundle them with every version of the OS. As a result, Edit was born.

Happy Editing!

Edit will be rolling out to the Windows Insider Program in the coming months. Edit is now open source, so you can build the code or install it from our GitHub repository.

If you have any feedback or questions, please reach out to the team on the official Edit repository!

The post Edit is now open source appeared first on Windows Command Line.

We’re pleased to announce that one of the latest additions to the list of official WSL distros is Fedora Linux! The Fedora Project has taken advantage of WSL’s new tar-based architecture to produce WSL images beginning with Fedora 42.

Try it out

To install it, run wsl –-install FedoraLinux-42and then launch it with wsl –d FedoraLinux-42. You’ll be prompted for a username, and then you’ll be ready to go. By default, your user does not have a password and is part of the wheel group which allows you to use sudo to run commands that require elevated privileges.

Tour of Fedora 42

If this is your first time using Fedora, the Fedora documentation is a good place to start as it includes guides, release notes, and directions for getting help if you encounter a problem.

Fedora uses the dnf package manager to install RPM packages. In addition to RPM packages, Fedora supports Flatpak for graphical applications. Note that flatpak is not currently included in the WSL image by default, so if you want to use Flatpaks you will need to install it with sudo dnf install flatpak. Next, follow the manual setup instructions for Flathub. After that, any application on Flathub is just a command away. For example, you could install Tally and count all the Fedora Linux releases.

The Fedora community works hard to ensure the newest stable versions of many popular projects are available. You’ll find the latest software development tools like GCC 15, LLVM 20, Golang 1.24, Ruby 3.4, PHP 8.4, Python 3.9 through the latest Python 3.14 alpha, and more.

Improvement and Feedback

This is just the beginning for Fedora on WSL. For example, there is ongoing work to enable graphical applications to take advantage of hardware acceleration, and there are opportunities to improve the flatpak experience.

If you have any questions, ideas about making Fedora on WSL better, or want to get involved in the Fedora Project, please join us on Fedora’s Discourse or chat with us on Matrix.

Finally, if you run into a bug or if something doesn’t work as expected, please report it as a bug.

Thanks

In addition to the thousands of contributors that make the Fedora Project run, this would not have been possible without the work of David Duncan, Neal Gompa, and Patrick Lang.

The post Fedora Linux is now an official WSL distro appeared first on Windows Command Line.

Windows Terminal Canary users can now use Terminal Chat with the GitHub Copilot Free plan!

GitHub Copilot Free is limited to 50 chat messages per month. This includes the usage of Copilot in the CLI, VS Code, and Visual Studio. If you reach your quota, you can upgrade on the web.

You can sign up for GitHub Copilot Free through the Copilot setting in your GitHub account. No subscription needed!

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant that helps you write code faster and with less effort, allowing you to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration.

GitHub Copilot has been proven to increase developer productivity and accelerate the pace of software development. For more information, see “Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness” in the GitHub blog.

What is GitHub Copilot Free?

GitHub Copilot Free provides limited access to select features of Copilot, allowing you to experience AI-powered coding assistance without a subscription. For more information on the features and limitations, see “About GitHub Copilot Free.”

What is Terminal Chat?

Terminal Chat is a feature in Windows Terminal Canary that allows the user to chat with an AI service (like GitHub Copilot ) to get intelligent suggestions in their terminal.

This feature does not ship with its own large-language model and can also be managed by Group Policy. See “Group Policy for Windows Terminal” for more information.

Use GitHub Copilot Free in Terminal Chat

Connecting GitHub Copilot in Terminal Chat allows you to get command suggestions and explanations without leaving the terminal. This is available for all GitHub Copilot customers using Windows Terminal Canary.

GitHub Copilot Free is limited to 50 chat messages per month. This includes the usage of Copilot in the CLI, VS Code, and Visual Studio. If you reach your quota, you can upgrade on the web.

Prerequisites

• Access to GitHub Copilot. If you don’t already have access to GitHub Copilot, you can sign up for GitHub Copilot Free without a subscription
• Windows Terminal Canary. You can download the latest build of Windows Terminal Canary from the Windows Terminal GitHub repository

Setup

1. Open the dropdown menu and select Settings
2. Go to the Terminal Chat (Experimental) setting
3. Under Service Providers, select GitHub Copilot and Authenticate via GitHub to sign in to your GitHub account
4. After successfully authenticating, ensure that Set as active provider is checked and click Save

After this, you will be able to use GitHub Copilot in Terminal Chat!

In the GIF above, you will see an end-to-end demo of the authorization flow and how to use Terminal Chat.

Clicking on Terminal Chat’s suggestion will copy it to the input line of your terminal. Terminal Chat will not run the suggestion automatically– This way, you will have time to reason over the command before executing it

For those that haven’t used Terminal Chat in a while, you’ll also notice that chat content can now be copied to the clipboard. We also changed the way we render commands in the chat (with horizontal scrolling too!)

If you used Terminal Chat with another GitHub Copilot plan in the past and have issues authenticating with your new GitHub Copilot Free plan, we recommend you selecting Clear stored auth tokens in the Terminal Chat (Experimental) setting and restarting Windows Terminal Canary.

Terminal Chat only communicates to GitHub Copilot when the user sends a message. The chat history and name of the user’s active shell is also appended to the message sent to GitHub Copilot. For more information on how to use GitHub Copilot responsibly with Windows Terminal, see “Responsible use of GitHub Copilot in Windows Terminal“.

Let’s Build Together

For now, Terminal Chat is only available in Windows Terminal Canary. We are committed to transparency and listening to user feedback. We strongly believe that the inclusion of the open-source community will help us define the roadmap for our core product, Windows Terminal.

If you are interested in the AI experiences that we are building, then check out the feature/llm branch of the Windows Terminal repository or download the latest build of Windows Terminal Canary.

If you have a feature request or found a bug, then please submit a new Issue on our GitHub repository. Send us feedback! Help us grow! And let’s build together!

If you need to set Group Policies for Terminal Chat, see our Group Policy documentation.

Lastly, if you want to explore the other features you get with GitHub Copilot (which includes GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio) then check out the GitHub Copilot website!

Thank you!

The post Terminal Chat now included in GitHub Copilot Free appeared first on Windows Command Line.