This document outlines our roadmap to delivering Windows Terminal v1.0 by spring 2020.
The Windows Terminal project is engineered and delivered as a set of 4-week milestones:
| Duration | Activity | Releases |
|---|---|---|
| 2 weeks | Dev Work
|
Release to Internal Selfhosters at end of week 2 |
| 1 week | Quality & Stability
|
Push to Microsoft Store at end of week 3 |
| 1 week | Release
|
Release available from Microsoft Store & GitHub Releases |
Ultimately, we're aiming for Terminal v1.0 to be feature-complete by Dec 2019, and to declare v1.0 by April 2020:
⚠ Note: Terminal v1.0 will be a quality-oriented release driven in large part by the community. So, if you see bugs, find/file them!
| Milestone end date | Milestone Name | Key Deliverables |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-05-07 | Announcement | Terminal announced & open-sourced (Build 2019 Terminal session, "Sizzle" video) |
| 2019-07-09 | v0.2 (update) | First version of the Terminal released via the Microsoft Store, fundamental features in place, basic tab control, basic UI layout, config & settings via JSON file |
| 2019-08-02 | v0.3 | Major UI improvements, improved tab bar layout & color, basic a11y support, Azure Cloud Shell connection |
| 2019-08-27 | v0.4 | HTML Copy, Tab Titles, Double/Triple Click Selection, Local Settings, JSON settings validation, A11y improvements |
| 2019-09-24 | 1909 | Stability & Quality improvements, installs Cascadia Code font, adds JSON schema to profiles.json settings file enabling Intellisense in VSCode, etc. |
| 2019-10-22 | 1910 | Cascading Settings, Dynamic Profiles |
| 2019-11-19 | 1911 | Final v1.0 feature work |
| 2019-12-17 | 1912 | "Feature Complete" - All v1.0 Features in-place |
| Winter Vacation | N/A | None planned |
| 2020-01-28 | Beta 1 | Pri 0/1/2 Bug fixes & polish |
| 2020-02-25 | Beta 2 | Pri 0/1 Bug fixes & polish |
| 2020-03-24 | RC | Pri 0 bug fixes |
| 2020-05 | v1.0 | Terminal v1.0 Release |
Each milestone above is/will be reflected in our GitHub milestones:
| Milestone | Description |
|---|---|
| Terminal-1909 | Work planned for 1909 |
| Terminal-1910 | Work planned for 1910 |
| Terminal-1911 | Work planned for 1911 |
| Terminal-1912 | Work planned for 1912 |
| <Future Milestones> | <Coming soon> |
| Terminal v1.0 | Work planned for v1.0, but not yet assigned to a milestone |
| Terminal Backlog | Work not yet assigned to a milestone or release |
Incoming issues/asks/etc. are triaged several times a week, labelled appropriately, and assigned to a milestone in priority order:
- P0 (serious crashes, data loss, etc.) issues are scheduled to be dealt with ASAP
- P1/2 issues/features/asks assigned to the current or future milestone, or to the Terminal v1.0 milestone for future assignment, if required to deliver a v1.0 feature
- Issues/features/asks not on our list of v1.0 features is assigned to the Terminal Backlog for subsequent triage, prioritization & scheduling.
The following are a list of the key scenarios we're aiming to deliver for Terminal v1.0.
👉 Note: There are many other features that don't fit within v1.0, but will be re-assessed and prioritized for v2.0, the plan for which will be published in early in 2020.
| Release | Priority* | Scenario | Description/Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| V1 | 0 | Performance & Efficiency | Terminal shall be fast and efficient. Input latency should be eliminated wherever possible. Terminal will be very memory-efficient, and will avoid utilizing unnecessary dependencies to minimize memory consumption and disk footprint |
| V1 | 0 | Reliability | Every reasonable step should be taken to ensure that Terminal will not crash unexpectedly. Crashing is considered harmful to the user's well-being & state of mind. Crashing issues are prioritized Pri-0 by default |
| V1 | 0 | Code Reuse | Terminal's core engine will reuse & share componentry from within Windows Console wherever feasible to minimize support & maintenance costs for both |
| V1 | 0 | Terminal Reuse | Terminal's core will be hostable as a UWP (and perhaps WPF) Control so that apps can host/embed a high quality Terminal. This will satisfy a long-standing ask from many customers and partners for a hostable/embeddable Terminal Control. |
| V1 | 0 | Rich, modern text renderer | Terminal must be able to render glyphs from East Asian and Middle Asian languages, inc. Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. Terminal will also be able to render Emoji - an increasingly important feature considering that several programming languages now support Emoji in method and variable names! To render such glyphs, the Terminal needs a DirectWrite-based layout & rendering system which supports font fallback, customizable text layout, GPU accelerated rendering, and many other features not currently supported by the built-in Windows Console |
| V1 | 0 | Solid Unicode & UTF-8 support | Terminal must be able to store data encoded as Unicode UTF-16/UCS-2 and UTF-8, including surrogate pairs. Note: Terminal v1.0 won't be able to support composing characters or grapheme clusters that are not representable with a single unicode codepoint - this will be addressed in a subsequent release |
| V1 | 0 | International text rendering | The Terminal will support rendering text for almost every language for which there is a fixed-width font including East Asian languages. Bonus points for RTL languages/scripts. |
| V1 | 0 | Multiple instances | Users must be able to launch multiple independent instances of the Terminal in order to run tools side-by-side / independently |
| V1 | 0 | Elevation | Terminal can be launched "elevated" with Admin rights if required so that the user can perform operations that affect machine-wide state |
| V1 | 0 | Multiple Tabs per instance | Each Terminal instance must support one or more independent tabs. This is the #1 ask from the community! |
| V1 | 0 | Configurability & Customization | The new Terminal will have a modern, flexible settings mechanism that persists settings to/from a JSON file stored in the user's app data folders, and/or in files synchronized between machines via OneDrive, etc. There will be no settings UI in Terminal v1 - this is a feature for a future Terminal release. |
| V1 | 0 | Accessibility (A11y) | The Terminal will be highly accessible and inclusive. It will expose its contents via UIA to support tools such as Windows Narrator, and UI automation tools including WinAppDriver |
| V1 | 1 | Color Theming & Styling | The Terminal will honor the user's Windows dark/light theme settings, and/or color accent settings. Also, the Terminal background & text colors will be highly configurable, and importable/exportable via settings files. |
| V1 | 1 | Background transparency | Background transparency is a valuable feature for many command-line users. Terminal will (optionally) support transparent backgrounds, but without making the Terminal's text content itself transparent (like the Windows Console currently does due to GDI limitations) |
| V1 | 1 | Fluent "Acrylic" blurred backgrounds | While full transparency is valuable to some, clear/full-transparency can be distracting. Some would like blurred transparency similar to Fluent Acrylic |
| V1 | 1 | Customizable Key Bindings | Terminal will provide a way for users to customize key bindings, enabling them to configure specific key chords to particular Terminal actions |
| V1 | 1 | Mouse Support | Terminal will support mouse input, passing mouse movements and actions to command-line apps |
| V1 | 2 | Azure Cloud Shell | Enable users to register their Azure account/subscription, and allow the Terminal to enumerate and automatically configure a connection to the user's Cloud Shell |
| V1 | 2 | Multiple panes | Multiple tabs are useful to some, but developers often need to see several files/logs on the same screen at the same time. Windows Terminal should allow a "page" to be split into "panes", each running independent commands/shells/etc. similar to tmux on *NIX/macOS |
Feature Notes:
* Feature Priorities:
- Mandatory
- Optimal
- Optional / Stretch-goal