You can now set the Windows Terminal as your default terminal emulator

Microsoft today announced the availability of Windows Terminal Preview 1.12. With this release, you can now set the Windows Terminal stable build as your default terminal emulator. You will need Windows 11 Insider Dev Channel release to enjoy this new feature. After setting Windows Terminal as the default, when you launch any command line application, it will automatically launch inside Windows Terminal.

Other new features in Windows Terminal Preview 1.12:

Profile matching

Windows Terminal will now appropriately handle matching the executable launched with its terminal profile. This means that all of your customizations will appear if you have a profile with the same executable as the one selected to launch. For example, clicking Command Prompt from the Start menu will open your Command Prompt profile, rather than your default profile running cmd.exe. This feature is only available in Windows Terminal Preview and will move into Windows Terminal in a future release.

Window restoration

You can now set your Windows Terminal to restore your previous tabs and panes after relaunching (Thanks @Rosefield!). This can be enabled with "firstWindowPreference" set to "persistedWindowLayout" in the global settings of your settings.json file or in your settings on the Startup page.

"firstWindowPreference": "persistedWindowLayout"

Full transparency

Windows Terminal now supports full transparency! Instead of using acrylic, you can have full transparency just like the transparency variation available in the original console. An improvement from the Windows Console Host in this implementation is that the text will remain opaque while the background turns transparent. This allows you to be able to read your terminal prompt without losing contrast!

Tip: You can control the transparency level of your window with Ctrl+Shift+Scroll.

Miscellaneous improvements

You can now select text that has been printed in your buffer with the keyboard!

Profiles for Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt (VS2017+) and Visual Studio Developer PowerShell (VS2019.2+) will now be automatically generated.

Elevated terminal windows will now display a shield icon to the left of the tabs to make the window more distinguishable.

You can now enable the "adjustIndistinguishableColors" profile setting to adjust the foreground color to make it more visible, based on the background color.

You can now select and interact with subtrees of panes.

When splitting a new pane, SplitState now accepts directional modifiers.

You can now open the system menu with Alt+Space, which uses the new openSystemMenu action.

Bug fixes

Using the touch keyboard should now invoke properly when tapping inside the console window

The mouse coordinates are now fixed for when the viewport is scrolled for all events.

When running multiple actions, selecting a new tab should now focus that tab immediately.

ou can now navigate pane focus without having to zoom out.

Source: Microsoft