Windows Terminal's 1.25 feature set finally reaches stable, with 1.26 quietly pushing forward
Microsoft shipped two coordinated builds of Windows Terminal today, and neither one is a splashy feature drop. Stable build 1.25.3131.0 finally rolls the 1.25 feature set out to everyone, while Preview 1.26.3133.0 services up the upcoming channel and quietly backports reliability fixes down into stable. It's a maintenance day, not a launch day.
Windows Terminal is Microsoft's modern replacement for the decades-old conhost.exe console host. It got open-sourced on GitHub back in May 2019, shipped its first stable build in May 2020, and has been the default terminal on Windows 11 since 22H2. Lead maintainer Howett runs it in a way that feels more like a passionate open-source project than a corporate product, and the release notes are the clearest sign of that.
Why the build numbers matter less than the label
Here's the thing about these two builds. The headline feature of each is a word, not a capability. General Availability. Microsoft's own notes for the stable build put it bluntly.
"With this release, Terminal 1.25 is being rolled out to General Availability; see the prior version for overall release notes."
Translation: the actual features landed three months ago with stable 1.25.2733.0 and Preview 1.26.2734.0, both from October 2. What these new builds add is polish. The kind you don't notice until it's missing.
That said, a few of those fixes are the sort you'd only appreciate if you've been bitten by them. The stable build reworks how screen-clearing commands behave, so a cls no longer forces the entire virtualized text buffer into memory each time. It's a memory and performance improvement borrowed straight from 1.26.
There's also a fix that lets screen-buffer-scrolling apps work again, and Microsoft bothers to name the culprit in the notes. "Such as vi from 1996," they write. Small, but telling.
The real additions live in Preview
The genuinely new stuff is in Preview 1.26.3133.0. You can now disable drag-and-drop tab management through a new enableTabDragDrop JSON setting, and disable the resize overlay with showResizeOverlay. Both default to on, so this is a power-user choice for anyone who'd rather not fight with tab layouts.
Experimental settings also get a high-visibility badge now, and Serbian Cyrillic localization got updated. On top of that, the Preview line inherits the same emulation fixes as stable, including the Kitty Keyboard Protocol work that keeps modifier keys straight across screen-buffer switches.
That Kitty protocol point is worth leaning into. Microsoft has repeatedly tied it to the rise of "agentic" command-line tools, and it's not hard to see why. An AI-driven terminal tool wants precise, unambiguous keyboard events, and Windows Terminal is quietly building the plumbing for that future.
The bigger 1.26 feature set still hasn't reached stable. Workspaces, which let you name and return to windows of open content, plus OSC 777 desktop notifications, remain Preview-only. So the current Preview build is as close as you'll get to the full picture right now.
Release Windows Terminal v1.25.3131.0 · microsoft/terminal
With this release, Terminal 1.25 is being rolled out to General Availability; see the prior version for overall release notes. Changes (1.26 backport) conhost: we now always use the "cls" detector...
Release Windows Terminal Preview v1.26.3133.0 · microsoft/terminal
A small servicing release for Terminal 1.26, most of which has also been backported to 1.25. Thanks everybody for using Preview and Canary! Changes You can now disable drag/drop tab management (js...
Release Windows Terminal Preview v1.26.3133.0 · microsoft/terminal
