Windows Terminal Preview v1.26.2734.0

We're coming out of our long Summer (northern hemisphere) hibernation to bring you a new Preview release of Windows Terminal: 1.26! We've been hard at work on the Settings page, workspaces, notifications, and general fit and finish. Lots more community contributions this time around (thank you to all of you!) and many of the bug fixes you see here have been backported to 1.25 and--in some cases--1.24!

Features

• This release includes our newly-redesigned settings UI! Broadly, the categories are the same, but we've given a new interface to most of our settings, simplified wording, moved things into logical groups, and more. Profiles is probably the biggest difference, where we've moved all of the profile tabs, color schemes and the Defaults section into one top-level "Profiles" area (#20232) (#20743) (#20336) (#20665) (#20200) (#20658) (#20646) (#20215) (#20199)
• We have added early support for "workspaces," or named Terminal windows which remember what was open in them that you can close and come back to. Access Workspaces with the new icon to the left of the tab list (#20314) (#20663)
• We now support applications emitting a notification with OSC 777 (Desktop Notification, from urxvt) and additionally support for displaying a notification when a bell is triggered. Please note that both of these behaviors are off by default, and require you to opt in to enable them. JSON settings $profile.compatibility.allowOSC777 (boolean) and $profile.bellStyle enum value notification (#20012) (#20018) (#20011) (#20064) (#20010)
• The "confirm closing tabs" setting has been redesigned to prompt any time you are going to close more than one thing, prompt always or prompt never (#20055)

Changes

• wt --help will try to be more clear about how unrecognized arguments are handled (#20417) (thanks Manya Sharma (@ManyaS-Git)!)
• Duplicating a tab will now unconditionally open it to the right of the source tab (#20565) (thanks OmarMashal (@OmarMashal0)!)
• On newer versions of Windows, Terminal will use faster APIs to query the app catalog to find fragment extensions (#20356)
• Our build system now requires Visual Studio 2026 and Windows SDK 10.0.26100 (#20225) (#20518) (#20609)
• Panes can no longer be reduced below 2 cells in either direction, to prevent screen corruption (#20564) (thanks zhangxaochen!)
• Tab Search will now "preview" which tab you are about to jump to while you're searching (#20256)
• Terminal will now cause DWM.exe to use less memory per Terminal window! (#20655) (thanks Yexuan Xiao (@YexuanXiao)!)
• The "Open New Window" action has been improved to make it impervious to app execution alias failures (i.e. wt.exe being corrupted) (#20311)
• The console will no longer emit WINDOW_EVENT events when a VT application enters or leaves the Alternate Screen Buffer (#20617)
• The info bar exhorting you to please not disable the "Touch, Keyboard, and Handwriting Input Service" has been removed (#20633)
• The soft reset (DECSTR) control sequence now works like xterm does when the alternate screen buffer is in use (#20032) (thanks aarushi singh (@aarushisingh04)!)
• The support for OSC 7 which was announced in version 1.25, and then removed, has likewise been removed from 1.26
• We are rolling out runtime changes to improve our code quality; however, that rollout is currently restricted to the Dev channel (local builds) (#20544)
• We got rid of the "new tab" animation, as it made the application appear slower (#20543)
• We have expanded our "built-in glyph" support to cover a large portion of the new Unicode "Symbols for Legacy Computing" block (we now cover U+1FB00 through U+1FB94, all sextants, filled triangles and trapezoids, and eighth blocks) (#20424)
• We have laid the groundwork for "per-window settings", which in the future will allow you to specify a different theme, profile, etc. for each Window or Workspace (#20328)
• We have made some changes under the hood to prepare for merging our "Terminal control" codebases (#20713) (#20711) (#20722) (#20017)
• We have renamed the (somewhat confusing, probably) "New Tab Menu" settings page to "Dropdown", and redesigned it to be (somewhat, maybe) easier to use (#20203)
• We will now show an overlay indicating the size in character cells of the window when you resize Terminal (#20059) (thanks Sagar (@sagarbhure-msft)!)
• When you close a tab, Terminal will now unconditionally jump to the previously most recently used tab (#20272) (thanks Anshika Jain (@Anshikakalpana)!)
• You can now customize what delimiter is used when you drop multiple files on a Terminal pane; JSON setting dragDropDelimiter (string, default is a single U+0020 space) (#19799) (thanks Vallabh Mahajan (@Vallabh-1504)!)

Bug Fixes

• IME candidate windows will no longer be positioned incorrectly when Terminal is maximized (#20627) (thanks Genki (@9enki)!)
• Terminal will no longer send arrow key inputs (and others) in the middle of an IME composition (#20471) (thanks sanguneo (@sanguneo)!)
• Custom shaders which depend on the time parameter will no longer experience an early rollover (#20360) (thanks Shivam Kumar (@Zish19)!)
• A completely empty terminal pane or console window will no longer try to commit the first 128 rows of the buffer to memory (#19984)
• Errors displayed in the Settings page will now be more visible in high contrast mode (#20098) (thanks Sushaanth Srinivasan (@SushaanthSrinivasan)!)
• Media paths referring to icon resources such as foo.exe,-1 will once again work (#20572) (thanks arista-ms!)
• Terminal should no longer leak memory with some graphics adapters when you are scrolled back into history or experience rendering lag after the machine resumes from sleep (#20723)
• Terminal will no longer stay open indefinitely with no windows open if it has been asked to host an incoming session that terminated early (#20051) (thanks kuldeep kumar (@Kuldeep2822k)!)
• The "action name" input field will no longer try to convince you that you hadn't changed anything (#20455)
• The "Open Current Working Directory" action will no longer attempt to open non-directories (#20697) (thanks Sebastien Tardif (@SebTardif)!)
• The font face selector in the settings UI will no longer cause Terminal to undergo rapid unscheduled disassembly (#20255) (thanks Danyal Ahmed (@danyalahmed1995)!)
  • ... it will also no longer instantly forget what you put in it (#20359) (thanks Danyal Ahmed (@danyalahmed1995)!)
• The JSON settings schema has been updated to include persistedLayoutAndContent as a valid option for firstWindowPreference (#20475) (thanks doterik!)
• We now use a lighter-weight API to play sounds when "bell sounds" are enabled (#20031) (thanks aarushi singh (@aarushisingh04)!)
• We now use the most recent Azure Cloud Shell API version, which ensures that you can still access your Cloud Shells (#20620) (thanks Mitchell Bifeld (@mbifeld)!)
• We've fixed some visual artifacts experienced by users of the "QQ Wubi" IME (#20542)

Reliability

• XBOX controllers will no longer cause Terminal to shuffle off this mortal coil (#20234) (thanks Phil Scott (@phil-scott-78)!)
• We will take fewer trips to a farm upstate when you use "terminal pane" shortcuts on the Settings, Markdown or Snippets UI (#20458)
• The experimental "reposition mouse cursor with click" settings will now result in fewer "bucket-kicking" events (#20442)

VT Support

• An application initiating an OSC 52 clipboard write at the same time as a title change will no longer experience a 5-second hang (#20728)
• A VT soft reset (DECSTR) will no longer result in the uploaded soft font (DRCS) being cleared (#20607) (thanks James Holderness (@j4james)!)
• Kitty Keyboard Protocol: auto-repeat events now work properly (#20500)
• Kitty Keyboard Protocol: dead keys and numpad Enter now work properly (#20551)
• Kitty Keyboard Protocol: non-ASCII keys, modifier repeats and AltGr keys now work properly (#20052)

Console Hosting

• ConPTY will no longer retry its cursor position request when the hosting application does not answer it (#20510)
• ConPTY will no longer wait for a DA1 response before finishing initialization (#20536)

Miscellaneous (console host, build systems, code health)

• conhost: headless console applications no longer spawn a useless render thread (#19986)
• conhost: we now always use the "cls" detector to prevent screen clearing from committing the entire (virtualized) text buffer (#19957)
• Our release engineering process now supports uploading our NuGet packages to GitHub (#20061)
• The "restart session" menu item on each tab will now be disabled if there is no session to restart (#19972)
• We've streamlined how we handle word-wise selection and navigation; this should result in no user-facing issues but 🤷 (#19882)

With additional documentation, build system, schema, and code health fixes thanks to Tushar (@tusharsnx), MichaelK (@MichaelK05-dev), BamBamTram32, Alimkhan Slambek (@slambek), Raza Khan (@raza-khan0108), nsfxdyj, Dinah Xiaoman G (@DinahK-2SO), nsfxdyj, Winston Liu (@winstliu), and 盗天叔叔 (@1816586742-stack).

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Binary files inside the unpackaged distribution archive bear the version number 1.26.260930004-preview.