MEGA THREAD: Design still subject to change, UI is pretty okay though

[DHowett-MSFT]

I am creating this so I can pin it & to help keep track of several related issues/work-items.

Things we know:

• The grab handles are bright white/accent color/dark black
• The grab handles are too narrow / the borders are too thick / why can't I use the area outside the window frame to resize?
• Add a UI to indicate a pane is focused. #994 Split panes need an indicator to show which is focused
• Scenario: Add support for panes  #1000 Literally anything having to do with panes
• Click/Right click icon should display Minimize/Maximize/Close menu
• When you click Cascade Windows , Show windows stacked etc is completely ignored by Terminal
• [Conpty] Add support for mouse input #376, [Terminal] VT Mouse Support #545 Commandline applications can't receive mouse input
• White border when Terminal is dark while Windows is in Light theme #4980 system theme light = light borders, even if terminal theme dark
• The title bar isn't acrylic, but now since architectural changes could be!

Things related to tabs:

• Epic: Fix remaining issues with non-client drawing #1625 Has another giant bucket of work that's more specific to the non-client area (where the tabs are)
• The area above the tabs isn't draggable
• Can't pop/drag out tabs
• Can't reorder tabs
• More complete tab sizing configurations #597 Without using tabs don't shrink/expand like browser tabs / I want to set a min width for my tabs / I want a fixed width for my tabs / I want tabs to expand to split the available space / any other possible tab sizing]
• Tab bar doesn't grow when you resize the window, it only shrinks #3300 Tab bar doesn't grow when you resize the window, it only shrinks (Regressed in v0.6)

Things that people want, but we won't be able to fix:

• Add setting to control Acrylic "Blur" in addition to opacity  #1753 Can only set "Opacity" of acrylic, not "Blur" / Can't have a non-acrylic transparency

Things fixed in v0.6:

• NonClientIslandWindow -- titlebar doubleclick no longer minmaxes #2513 Double click to non-client area should maximize the Window.
• The default 'active' tab contrast is very low #771 The default 'active' tab contrast is very low (especially light mode)
• The tabs don't look as good as you'd like UI Suggestion: Visually link tab to console view #702
  
• Tabs in title bar are cut off when scrolling the tabs + tabs not scrolling automatically #857 When the window is smaller than the sum of the width of the tabs, the tabs are cut off, without indication to scroll

Things fixed in v0.5:

• Make Alt+F4 work and warn the user about terminating more than one tab #1589 Alt+F4 doesn't close the Window (PR#2526)

Things fixed in v0.3:

• The non-client area looks wrong; PR Apply a GDI region to the top level Island window to allow dragging with a single Xaml Island #929, Issue We need to draw the whole non-client area ourselves #872
  

• The plus button is too big, too small, too wide, too narrow (fixed in Style the button and tab view background to match the titlebar #1934)
  

• Use tab-bar/title bar for dragging window around #564 draggable area in title bar (PR Enable dragging with the entire titlebar #1948)

• When maximized on displays with a different DPI, the edges of the window are cut off. (Fixed by Fix wrong maximized window offset on non primary monitors #1921)

• Feature request: suppress VT title and prefer profile name (or something else) #608 the text of my tabs is too long

• I'm using the dark theme but am still seeing a white border and header are still white. (Might be fixed by Apply a GDI region to the top level Island window to allow dragging with a single Xaml Island #929)
  

• (caused by Apply a GDI region to the top level Island window to allow dragging with a single Xaml Island #929, tracked in Epic: Fix remaining issues with non-client drawing #1625 Add a setting to enable the using the Accent Color for the titlebar #1963) The titlebar does not have my accent color in it
  

• Resizing the window causes the UI to disapper/reappear.
  

[mdtauk]

The plus glyph will probably shrink, I commented on the TabControl issue, and it seems they will push the change, to match the smaller glyph used by UWP Edge.

[Jaykul]

Yeah, I think we can all agree "make the tabs like Edge Chrome" is nice, but "make the tabs like the promo video" is even better ... 😣

[mdtauk]

I think the UWP Edge had nicer tabs than Edge Chrome. 🤔

[19lmyers]

Personally I wish they'd make Edge Chrome's tabs like UWP Edge, but nobody asked me...

[Jaykul]

Yeah, yeah, but ... either of them is waaaay ahead of Terminal 🤡
Edgium has almost 20 pixels above the tabs that are ugly ... but ... draggable!
And with both of them, you can at least tell which tab is active 🙄

[3dWrecker]

There is no PRACTICAL use for acrylic when coding. However transparency is very useful. It means I can view code beneath the Terminal window like this:

Please add an adjustment for the BLUR factor that acrylic uses. I can't read blurred out text.

Also if the Terminal did not go black when inactive like this:

it would be really useful to be able to have a pin button which pinned the terminal above all other windows. This would enable seamless switching between the terminal and whatever code editor you are using (especially if you can read code beneath the Terminal window.)
I suggest that the acrylic theme should stay active instead of "going black" if an "Always on top" feature is added and enabled.

What it could look like:

The pin icon, to pin the Terminal above all windows.
@nacorv,

I would like to know if "Always on top" is a feature that would be considered.

[3dWrecker]

Selecting and dragging anywhere within the tab area currently does not move the window. This makes it necessary to move the mouse to the right of the tab area, which leaves a very small amount of titlebar which can be used to move the window. Please change this. No rush!

[Plasma]

1. Turning on acrylic in Powershell makes the purple parameters like -abc appear near invisible.

[sachinjoseph]

Resolution: 4K
Display Scaling: 100%

Light theme:

Dark theme:

[liamfoneill]

Resizing the window causes the UI to disapper/reappear. I am using the Windows Store Preview Version 0.2.1715.0

[momos11]

Fullscreen:

Resized:

If the window is not big enough, all the other tabs are hidden.

[benc-uk]

If the tab bar can't be acrylic, that's a major shame.
Anything that can be done to make them integrate better would be most welcome

The non drag-able tab/title bar is the #1 complaint I've heard from everyone that has tried the early builds

Split panes need some visual polish, make it clear which is in focus, some animation even as it opens

[thejsa]

When maximised on my 2nd monitor (1366x768 laptop built-in display, not set as main), the edges of the app are cut off:

[robster2001]

Tabs show the path to the executable instead of the name of the app; if the path is too long, the "x" to close the tab is pushed off the right side of the tab and is invisible.

Clicking "Settings" attempts to open a JSON file. I'm guessing that the UI for that hasn't been built yet. :)

[allen-chin]

As an addition to @robster2001's comments, it'd be nice if each tab showed the actual path like Ubuntu and if it was in administrator mode (e.g. Command Prompt (Admin) - C:\current\path\that\you\are\in).

When you don't have terminal maximized, as I usually don't, the issue #857 combined with the long titles allows for much less tabs than what it could be.

[GenesisCraig]

The tabs are just too wide to be useful. Perhaps just show the executable and give the path/etc information when you hover over the tab in a tooltip or something.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Two things:
Panes are not bound by default because they are incomplete. If you enable them yourself, YMMV.

If you want a custom tab title, you should look at how to set that up for your shell. It’ll benefit you everywhere you use your shell. By making powershell set the title, you change the title for Windows Terminal, legacy console, VSCode, ConEmu and a bunch of other things. It can even change in the middle of a session!

[DHowett-MSFT]

Panes epic: #1000

[csells]

I couldn't find anywhere along the caption at the top of the window that allowed me to drag and move the window. I had to resort to keyboard shortcuts.

[csells]

two-finger scrolling doesn't work, although it works great on cmd.com and PowerShell.

[thomthom]

Tabs cannot be moved/rearranged.

[r4dian]

If Powerline/ohmyzsh/zpresto, (for example) adds a background on the right of the line, then once you hit the bottom of the window that background appears also in places it shouldn't (to repro, run a command with long output twice, with a similar prompt setup.)

[ghost]

The acrylic NavigationView doesn't look that good with tabs.
I think it should either have the same background as the rest of the page, or there should be a header above it.

[ghost]

I suggest having the search menu (Ctrl+Shift+F) be detached from the titlebar for a couple of reasons:

• the new WinUI TabView style has a border at the bottom and the menu won't be seamlessly connected anymore
• WinUI now tries to avoid having sharp corners at all
• other apps with a similar menu have it being detached

Would something like this be good? It has an 8px margin at the top, like the Command Palette.

[Tropix126]

I've thrown together this quick concept of what Terminal might look like with WinUI 2.6 controls and mica.

[Tropix126]

Dark mode

[Tropix126]

Settings

About dialog + Command palette

[Tropix126]

Finally, here's a concept for the find and replace flyout based on @gabrielconl 's idea

[quietrobot]

I've thrown together this quick concept of what Terminal might look like with WinUI 2.6 controls and mica.

Yes!!!!!!

[miniksa]

Thanks @Tropix126. We are trying to move to WinUI 2.6 so we can get their styling work, but we're currently blocked by microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml#5435. I've engaged with the WinUI team internally to hopefully get us past this.

[Tropix126]

Looks like efforts have started on MUX 2.7 adoption in #11720.

[zadjii-msft]

The above work is something we're tracking in #3327. There's more discussion there, so I'll redirect the above couple comments to that thread instead. Thanks!

[mhtvsSFrpHdE]

I don't care about the design language battle or something,
but could we just have a "Disable border radius" optional checkbox?

Here is my Firefox customization, I only applied border-radius: 0 CSS to every UI and get this beauty
Every other design was inherited from stock, just removed all the rounded corners

I believe Windows Terminal can get similar looking too if we simply allow user choice to disable corners

[KiruyaMomochi]

Colored tabs feels a little separated.
To make it looks more like a hole, maybe add a colored line below the tab?

[tunaflsh]

Dragging the window above the taps is still not supported yet? I just somehow accidentally moved my window too far to the right and I couldn't reach the draggable zone anymore.

[zadjii-msft]

Hey all,

I'm gonna finally close this thread out with the release of Windows Terminal 1.17. This release finally adds support for Mica, and with that, I'm gonna call this "done". I think we've settled enough on what the design of the Terminal is going to be going forward, and we've established a mechanism (through Themes) for users to add additional UI customizations as they see fit.

There's been a large number of minor suggestions for changes to the UI that have accumulated in this thread over the years. I'm under the impression that these should all be tracked as sub-points in our "Themes megrathread", #3327, at this point (my apologies if I missed anyone). Obviously, these aren't all done, but the fundamental framework is now in place for storing these Theme settings, so when these features are ever added, exposing them as optional settings should be "easy". There's also other minor functional nits (like #5493) which don't really need this megathread tracking them anymore.

Thanks to the 145 of you who have commented on this thread, and countless more of you following for updates. It's hard to believe how far the Terminal has come over the years, from v0.1 to what's possible today:

I'm really happy with the way this has all come together over the years, and that wouldn't have been possible without the absolute breadth of feedback we've gotten here (and in other threads) ❤️