Windows Terminal Canary (nightly build) is now available!

[DHowett]

Hey all! 👋

Windows Terminal Canary is here!

While we work on refining our distribution plans for Terminal Canary, I wanted to post some getting-started links here for you adventurous folks who want to live on the leading edge. It tracks our main branch and will almost certainly be broken from time to time!

Canary Distributions

App Installer

This is an evergreen, architecture-independent application installer that supports automatic updating.

Note
Due to some platform limitations, this installer only works on Windows 11. We're working hard on bringing this option to our beloved Windows 10 users!

Portable ZIP

Tried-and-true zip files, with no automatic updates or automatic checking for updates.

Terminal Canary portable works on Windows 10 (19041+) and Windows 11.

Learn more about the types of Windows Terminal distributions.

Others?

For now, we're not intending to publish Canary channel updates via WinGet or the GitHub releases page, as we feel that they would be much too noisy.

---

Distribution	Architecture	Link
App Installer	x64, arm64, x86	download
Portable ZIP	x64	download
Portable ZIP	ARM64	download
Portable ZIP	x86	download

[DHowett]

Dustin's Wishlist

• Display the git commit in the About dialog
• Some way to check for (and install?) updates for the ZIP version
• What if the About dialog showed what Velocity features were enabled? That would be cool
• Somehow tell users what changes to look for
• Make sure that Canary works as "Default Console Host"

[Dhyfer1]

Thanks for sharing the link for the canary distribution, but why is there no link to download the dev version?

[DHowett]

Canary is the same as Dev, we just give Dev different branding so that people can still work on the project! If we started distributing Dev builds, people wouldn't be able to build and debug Terminal with Visual Studio because of conflicts 😄

[DHowett]

If I may ask, why are you hoping to get the Dev branded build specifically?

[XenoPanther]

I hope you don't mind me asking, do you have an ETA on getting Canary to work as the default console host?

[zadjii-msft]

Canary should work as the default Terminal today (assuming you used the app installer on Windows 11). The default terminal stuff requires an app package, so the zip installs won't be able to work for that unfortunately.

I don't think we have any plans to just replace the default console host at this time.

[zcobol]

How to update terminal canary versions? Checking update there was 1.20.2851.0 available but the only way to upgrade was to download the *.appinstaller and double-click on it. Is there any other way to upgrade canary?

[akulbe]

When I went to the "About" page, under the version it said "Update available" and then when I restarted it, it was at version 1.20.2861.0

[giggio]

Same thing here. But I had to force close the WindowsTerminal.exe process under that was started under svchost.exe.
I noticed the version changed. Before:

After:

There should be a command to update/check for update, I'll open an issue for that.
There is already an issue for that: #15132