Everyone knows that Microsoft Windows mostly use Graphical User Interface (GUI) for interaction.
One of the reasons is because, with GUI, Microsoft can make sure that the operating system can appeal to the general public. In its long attempt to get as many users as possible, this approach has proven successful for the tech giant.
But know that there are always a lesser number of people who just love to fiddle and dive into the guts of the operating system, preferring commands to be typed on keyboards rather than using mouse clicks.
This is why Windows also has CMD, cmd or cmd.exe, for example.
Also known as "Command Prompt", it's the command-line interpreter, considered as a counterpart of COMMAND.COM in DOS and Windows 9x systems, and analogous to the Unix shells used on Unix-like systems.
And here, Microsoft is launching another command line app for Windows, dubbed Windows Terminal, designed to be the central location for access to environments like Cmd or PowerShell, Cmd, or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
While Terminal is meant for those users who just love to tweak things by command lines, the interface while centered around the command line, the overall design looks more like Windows and the Edge web browser, with tabs and all.
Instead of making it coder-centric, Microsoft is adding multiple tab support alongside theming and customization for those who want to tweak the Terminal app.
Here, users can create multiple profiles for each app, shell, or tool that they import to Terminal. Each profile here, can have its own color theme, background blur level, font style and size.
Microsoft also noted that Windows Terminal uses a GPU accelerated DirectWrite/DirectX-based text rendering engine. What this means, users can use any text character, icons, symbol, emoji, ligatures, or glyphs installed on their device next to improved text output and rendering improvements.
According to Microsoft:
"The Terminal will also need to meet our goals and measures to ensure it remains fast, and efficient, and doesn't consume vast amounts of memory or power."
Microsoft unveiled the Windows Terminal app during the company’s Build developer conference on March 6th, 2019, with plans to include category for extensions to create a group of add-ons.
The software giant plans to make Terminal available to all users in mid-June, marking its efforts to improve the developer environment on Windows 10.
Alongside Terminal, Microsoft has also updated Windows Subsystem for Linux, designed specifically for those power users, and included a full virtualized Linux kernel to the Linux subsystem.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is essentially an embedded Linux window.
In the update, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (or WSL 2), is based on the Linux 4.19 kernel, explained Microsoft in a blog post. It's based on an "in-house custom-built Linux kernel to underpin the newest version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)."
The same technology is built within Azure, Microsoft added, and this is an advantage as it can reduce boot time and lower memory use.
“WSL 2 also improves filesystem I/O performance, Linux compatibility, and can run Docker containers natively so that a VM is no longer needed for containers on Windows,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft previously added the Linux command line to Windows 10 alongside adding native OpenSSH to the operating system and even listing Ubuntu in the Windows Store.
To further show its support for the open-source community, Microsoft has posted the source code to GitHub, allowing developers to see and use it as it is to see what's what.