Scott Hanselman posts on Twitter about the availability of Windows Terminal:

“My fellow Windows users, our long national nightmare is over.” The Windows Terminal is here, it’s open source, it’s real, and it’s spectacular. It’s very early days to be clear, but the new Windows Terminal is open source and it’s up at https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal for you to check out.

From GitHub: Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users. It includes many of the features most frequently requested by the Windows command-line community including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability (with a bit of JSON), theming & styling, and more.

I want it, where is it? There are no binaries to download quite yet. The Windows Terminal is in the very early alpha stage, and not ready for the general public quite yet. If you want to jump in early, you can try building it yourself from source. Otherwise, you’ll need to wait until Mid-June for an official preview build to drop. Windows Terminal will be delivered via the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 and will be updated regularly, ensuring you are always up to date and able to enjoy the newest features and latest improvements with minimum effort.

Is it just an executable now? Nope, you need a number of packages listed in GitHub and build it. Best to wait for the Windows App store version if not a techie. There will be early builds in the Store this summer and 1.0 should be out before the end of the year.

Is it Open Source? Can I contribute? Yes, and Yes!

Lastly, in the JSON customizability, you can even set custom backgrounds, here is a picture of an animated GIF as a background to terminal.

See the project GitHub site and Scott’s blog for more (and Twitter for more animated customizations).