Windows Terminal v1.16.1023 (10231 and 10232)

[DHowett]

After a long wait, many of the features in Terminal Preview 1.16 are making their way to the stable channel:

• Themes: Terminal now has support for themes!
• We have a new experimental text rendering engine, which is off by default. It's faster and handles some situations better (and some much worse, like certain fonts that don't have a true "italic" style). You can enable it in the Rendering settings.
• This release marks the triumphant return of the "adjust brightness of indistinguishable colors" feature
• For the old conhost fans in the room, you can now set experimental.enableColorSelection (global, bool, default false)

After this release, Terminal Stable is moving to a quarterly feature release cycle. Since we're the default console host in Windows 11 October 2022 Update, some care is required in how quickly we distribute updates. That having been said: there will still be servicing updates and Preview channel updates, so stay tuned!

Please see the following release notes for additional details:

• Windows Terminal Preview v1.16.252
• Windows Terminal Preview v1.16.264
• Windows Terminal Preview v1.16.346

Note that the new scrollbar mark feature is not included in this Stable build. Yet.

IMPORTANT
This version was made available to the Dev External flighting ring (Windows Insiders) first, and will be
released to general availability later depending on its reliability.

Preinstallation Kit info

A preinstallation kit is available for system integrators and OEMs interested in prepackaging Windows Terminal with a Windows image. More information is available in the DISM documentation on preinstallation. Users who do not intend to preinstall Windows Terminal should continue using the msixbundle distribution.

Why are there so many packages? How do I choose?

This version of Windows Terminal is distributed in two bundles, one of which works on Windows 10-11 and the other of which only works on Windows 11.

If you intend on using Terminal as an unpackaged application--that is, extracting the msix file--we recommend that
you use the Win10 bundle. You will need the Visual C++ runtime redistributable.

In addition, if you install the packaged version on either Windows 10 or Windows 11, it now depends on the Visual C++ Universal Runtime Package.

Despite these distributions having different version numbers, they are built from the same code and there is no
functional difference between them.

If you install the Windows 10 version on Windows 11, it will probably automatically upgrade itself to the Windows 11
version. It turns out that it is impossible to have two bundles with the same version number, so it has to be this
way.

In addition to the above, we've backported the following changes and bugfixes from Windows Terminal Preview 1.16:

Changes

Fundamentals

• The contents of the Terminal package are now code-signed, so those of you who deploy it unzipped will no longer get in
  trouble with your IT folks (Code sign the contents of the Terminal package #14710)

Bug Fixes

• We now attempt to account for transparent tab backgrounds when calculating the text foreground color (Make sure focused tab text color accounts for alpha #14643)
• You can now drag/drop more than 16 items directly out of 7-Zip (and some other applications) (Fix missing paths when items dropped from archive #14648) (thanks @jiejasonliu!)
• Malformed settings objects will no longer cause an "Application error 0x%" settings warning (Fix an issue where JsonUtils produces a bad error message #14668)
• We've updated the JSON schema to contain theme objects (Add the Theme schema for 1.16 #14672) (Update the Theme schema for 1.17 #14666)

Reliability

• We've removed a leading cause of crashes closing panes and tabs while screen reading was active (Ensure TermControl is not closing when firing UIA events #14714)
• Input will no longer (rarely) trigger a crash when a screen reader is enabled (Add mutex to keyEvents in TermControlAutomationPeer #14694)
• wpf: stop dereferencing null pointers already! come on, it's 2023! ([WPF] Add TermCore null checks to HwndTerminal #14678)

Performance

• We have removed our dependency on Microsoft.Toolkit.Win32.UI.XamlApplication.dll (Remove our dependency on Microsoft.Toolkit.Win32.UI.XamlApplication #14520)

Accessibility

• Our internal management window will no longer appear as an empty pane to screen readers (Introduce PseudoConsoleWindow a11y provider #14541)

With additional documentation, code health, grammar, spelling, workflow security and maintenance help from @AtariDreams,
@musvaage, @sashashura, @grammar-police, @Dan-Albrecht, @d-caldasCaridad and @ianjoneill, @jsoref. Thanks so much!

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Asset Hashes

• Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_Win10_1.16.10231.0_8wekyb3d8bbwe.msixbundle
  • SHA256 66856D96BB62AFB175ED9C1C267C145F494549F02416CD5CF33C194790D9C9BC
• Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_Win10_1.16.10231.0_8wekyb3d8bbwe.msixbundle_Windows10_PreinstallKit.zip
  • SHA256 0719A0E024E0E4ED37A9434308D7A0FC5A86769F209F9F68F7B744D7154390D5
• Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_Win11_1.16.10232.0_8wekyb3d8bbwe.msixbundle
  • SHA256 786FE246C30F672D8464A1303917F9166B4809F8589C51B95B4DF33388FCA3AD
• Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_Win11_1.16.10232.0_8wekyb3d8bbwe.msixbundle_Windows10_PreinstallKit.zip
  • SHA256 3DD84940EBEA9F5BE0F69AEE326DB902116F9F8E5DE55DD5EDE966C4323C1F0E

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This discussion was created from the release Windows Terminal v1.16.1023 (10231 and 10232).