Windows Terminal Preview 1.7 Release | Hacker News Reader

Windows Terminal Preview 1.7 Release

devblogs.microsoft.com

6 pointszadjii12 comments

I'm most excited about the windowing improvements in 1.7. That's something that I've been working on for a while, and marks the start of actual deliverable progress in this area.

At the end of this road is support for actually being able to tear out and re-attach tabs. It's such a common use case for other tabbed applications, but the Terminal wasn't really designed from the start to support.

Yes. Like all UWP apps, they were not designed for use on desktop computers.

This includes "Windowing" (windowing is broken on windows), as well scaling, because on UWP apps cannot be scaled individually and everything is huge by default.

But instead of fixing windowing, making the app start faster, microsoft developers prioritized the settings UI, because apparently the most important thing is to be able to easily change the bad defaults.

What the heck are you going on about? The Terminal uses UWP XAML, sure, but it's a Win32 app. I'm not sure how windowing on Windows is something that's the Terminal's responsibility to fix. The DPI scaling on the Terminal is something we actually worked quite hard on - people are quite passionate about the way the text looks on their PCs, especially if they have high DPI displays.

The Terminal launches pretty quickly. It could be better, it could always be better. But I certainly don't think that it's the highest priority issue we're tracking.

The settings UI has been of the most requested features for the Terminal since it launched. I'm happy to ship something that a large number of our users actually _do_ want.

Because Windows Terminal uses UWP that windowing is broken.

Apps that are not UWP can deal with windowing perfectly well. They can also deal with transparency, more upvoted than settings, tab tearoff, drag and drop, scaling and theming UI elements, etc...

I look at the terminal's github, and you guys are planning to add an extensions store before doing all of these things?

> They can also deal with transparency

That's a fair point. Vintage style opacity is something that's blocked on WinUI 3 unfortunately. I wish there was a better answer than that, but that's the world we live in. I promise you, as soon as we can move to WinUI 3 and get that vintage style opacity, we will be.

Tab tearoff and reattach is literally the thing I'm starting on next week. I've had some promising prototypes, but it's a _lot_ of work.

Theming is one of my personal pet features, and it made me really sad to have to cut it from 2.0. Something about a global pandemic really made it hard to ship everything we wanted this year.

Extensions are fully a 3.0 feature. That's definitely not landing any time on this side of 2022.

I looked at the repository, and quake mode is priority 3, and the settings UI is priority 0.

Quake mode is more upvoted than settings UI.

And don't get me started on WinUI 3. Everytime I look at the WinUI roadmap, it gets pushed further, with the wanted features removed, and irrelevant things prioritized.

And that's by the same team that shipped UWP 1.0

Upvotes are not the only way of measuring the popularity of an issue, though they certainly are the easiest. The settings UI has had a _ridiculous_ number of issues filed asking for the same thing, while quake mode had much fewer. For whatever reason, people are more willing to upvote the existing quake mode issue, rather than file a new issue, compared to users asking for the settings UI. Perhaps there's some commentary on the type of users asking for those features that could be made based on their behavior.

Plus, I'm literally working on a [quake mode spec](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/9274). We're reviewing that next week. I've got a prototype.Quake mode required a lot more infrastructural work than the SUI, so it was my opinion that we might not be able to get to it this release cycle (i.e. 2.0). As it turns out, we're closer than I thought we would be.

We can make progress on lots of different things all at once - there is surprisingly, more than one dev on the team. The roadmap doc is not something that we update all that frequently. We've got better things to do - like work on features :)

The JSON fragments looks useful, it could be a good way to get a team set up with some consistency between them.

Ooh that's a really good idea. I'm gonna try throwing something like that together for the dev team. Thanks for the inspiration!

Thanks zadjii, I have really been enjoying the new Windows Terminal and the new settings UI is pretty slick. It's been something I have been desiring ever since I started doing web development on Windows years ago.

It would be nice if the automatic shell detection picked up Git Bash installations.

That's exactly the point for settings fragments! It'd be impossible for us to detect everything that anyone wanted to add to the Terminal, but hopefully now git bash can ship a snippet with their installer that the Terminal would automatically pick up!

Interesting, I'll have to look into that some more. It looks like a good solution.

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