Windows Terminal Preview 1.16 is now live with new text rendering engine, colors, and themes

A couple of months ago, Microsoft released Windows Terminal Preview 1.15 with full keyboard selection support as well as experimental support for scrollbar marks. Today, the company has rolled out version 1.16, which seems to be a pretty significant update.

For starters, a global property for themes has been added that allows you to customize your Windows Terminal windows to your heart's content. You can modify themes from the JSON file and select them from the Settings section. You can also customize tabs, tab rows, and windows, but if you don't know where to start, check out Microsoft's documentation of the subject here.

Additionally, more colors have been introduced to give Terminal a more "cohesive" appearance. You should also know that the application will now use dark theme as the default rather than relying on system theme.

Speaking of default configurations, the new text rendering engine that was introduced with Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 is now the default render for all profiles. Microsoft has noted several benefits of this engine including better performance, support for more pixel shaders, bold text, and underline/overline/hyperlink lines. Furthermore, if the machine you are using Windows Terminal Preview 1.16 on doesn't have a GPU, the engine will automatically switch to a more performant mode that does not depend on the GPU.

Other changes to look forward to are the ability to set where new tabs appear and to expand text selection to a word by modifying the JSON file. The colors page has also been redesigned, you can have a look in the image slider widget below:

There are lots of other improvements and bug fixes too, check them out below:

Miscellaneous improvements

• Mark mode key bindings now precede custom key bindings.
• When in mark mode, you can now Tab and Shift+Tab between hyperlinks.
• The setting to adjust the colors of indistinguishable text is now enabled by default.
• We’ve modified the default dark and light theme colors for a more seamless appearance between the tab and the text buffer.
• The back button in the command palette now returns to the previously selected item in the filtered action list (Thanks @JerBast!).

Bug fixes

• When BEL is emitted in a light terminal, the flash in the pane will now darken rather than brighten (Thanks @Fyrebright!).
• When pasting a multiple lines, the whitespace is no longer removed (Thanks @serd2011!).
• CloseOnExit will now automatically close the Terminal when terminated if it launched by a process, otherwise Terminal will close with the graceful behavior.

Finally, for those wanting a more stable experience, Windows Terminal has been updated to version 1.15 too. It contains all the features detailed in the changelog for Windows Terminal Preview 1.15 here. You can download Windows Terminal 1.15 and Windows Terminal Preview 1.16 from the Microsoft Store, GitHub, or Windows Package Manager (winget). For those keeping track, the latest release for Windows Terminal is v1.15.252 and for Windows Terminal Preview, it is v1.16.252.