Terminal Services On Windows 10



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  1. You can invoke most features of Windows Terminal through the command palette. The default key combination to invoke it is Ctrl + Shift + P. Open a new pane You can run multiple shells side-by-side using panes.
  2. Sep 25, 2019 Open Mac Spotlight using the ⌘ + space keyboard shortcut. Then type the word 'terminal' and select Terminal from the dropdown list. Paste the following command into your terminal and hit enter: diskutil list. You will see output like this (note - your Mac's terminal may be black text on a white background if you haven't customized it).

Windows Server 2008 is expected to officially launch in February of next year, but many companies are already preparing for the next generation of Windows server software and trying to decide. Many organizations that use Remote Desktop Services or Terminal Services are not using a VPN connection before allowing connections to their in-house servers or workstations. If no VPN is required.

Windows 10 has a built-in SSH client that you can use in Windows Terminal.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to set up a profile in Windows Terminal that uses SSH.

Create a profile

You can start an SSH session in your command prompt by executing ssh user@machine and you will be prompted to enter your password. You can create a Windows Terminal profile that does this on startup by adding the commandline setting to a profile in your settings.json file inside the list of profile objects.

For more information, see:

Specify starting directory

To specify the starting directory for a ssh session invoked by Windows Terminal, you can use this command:

The -t flag forces pseudo-terminal allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine, e.g. when implementing menu services. You will need to use escaped double quotes as bourne shell derivatives don't do any additional parsing for a string in single quotes.

For more information, see:

Resources

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This guide addresses some of the common errors and obstacles you may encounter when using Windows Terminal.

Opening the settings does nothing (or opens an unexpected application)

If you click on the 'settings' button in the dropdown, the Terminal will attempt to open the settings file, settings.json. This will cause the OS to try and launch your configured .json file editor. This might be Visual Studio, or Notepad, or some other completely unexpected application. If there isn't a configured .json editor on your machine, then the OS will eventually show you the 'How do you want to open this file' dialog.

Tip

You can also use the settings UI to configure your settings if you are using Windows Terminal Preview. You can learn how to open the settings UI on the Actions page.

Set your WSL distribution to start in the home ~ directory when launched

By default, the startingDirectory of a profile is %USERPROFILE% (C:Users<YourUsername>). This is a Windows path. For WSL, however, you may want to use the WSL home path instead. startingDirectory only accepts a Windows-style path, so setting it to start within a WSL distribution requires a prefix.

Beginning in Windows 10 version 1903, the file systems of WSL distributions can be addressed using the wsl$ prefix. For any WSL distribution with the name DistroName, use wsl$DistroName as a Windows path that points to the root of that distribution's file system.

For example, the following setting will launch the 'Ubuntu-18.04' distribution in its home file path:

Setting the tab title

To have the shell automatically set your tab title, visit the set the tab title tutorial. If you want to set your own tab title, open the settings.json file and follow these steps:

  1. In the profile for the command line of your choice, add 'suppressApplicationTitle': true to suppress any title change events that get sent from the shell. Adding only this setting to your profile will set the tab title to the name of your profile.

  2. If you want a custom tab title that is not the name of your profile, add 'tabTitle': 'TITLE'. Replacing 'TITLE' with your preferred tab title.

Command line arguments in PowerShell

Visit the Command line arguments page to learn how command-line arguments operate in PowerShell.

Command line arguments in WSL

Visit the Command line arguments page to learn how command-line arguments operate in WSL.

Problem setting startingDirectory

If the startingDirectory is being ignored in your profile, first check to make sure your settings.json's syntax is correct. To help you check this syntax, '$schema': 'https://aka.ms/terminal-profiles-schema' is automatically injected. Some applications, like Visual Studio Code, can use that injected schema to validate your json file as you make edits.

If your settings are correct, you may be running a startup script that sets the starting directory of your terminal separately. For example, PowerShell has its own separate concept of profiles. If you are changing your starting directory there, it will take precedence over the setting defined in Windows Terminal.

Alternatively, if you are running a script using the commandline profile setting, it may be that you are setting the location there. Similar to PowerShell profiles, your commands there take precedence over the startingDirectory profile setting.

The purpose of startingDirectory is to launch a new Windows Terminal instance in the given directory. If the terminal runs any code that changes its directory, that may be a good place to take a look.

Deleting a profile

By default, Windows Terminal ships with a built-in PowerShell and a Command Prompt profile. The terminal will also autodetect if other command line applications are installed, such as PowerShell Core, WSL distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, etc), and Azure Cloud Shell. We call these types of automatically generated profiles 'Dynamic profiles'.

Terminal Services On Windows 10

For both built-in and dynamic profiles, deleting the profile from your settings.json file will not remove it from your profiles. Built-in profiles are defined in defaults.json, so they're always available. Dynamic profiles will attempt to create a JSON stub for their profile in your settings.json file whenever a profile is not already present in the file.

The only way to truly remove these profiles from the list is by 'hiding' them. To hide a profile, add the property 'hidden': true to the profile.

Ctrl+= does not increase the font size

If you are using a German keyboard layout, you may run into this problem. ctrl+= gets deserialized as ctrl+shift+0 if your main keyboard layout is set to German. This is the correct mapping for German keyboards.

More importantly, the app never receives the ctrl+shift+0 keystroke. This is because ctrl+shift+0 is reserved by Windows if you have multiple keyboard layouts active.

If you would like to disable this feature in order for Ctrl+= to work properly, follow the instructions for 'Change Hotkeys to Switch Keyboard Layout in Windows 10' in this blog post.

Change the 'Switch Keyboard Layout' option to 'Not Assigned' (or off of ctrl+shift), then select OK and then Apply. ctrl+shift+0 should now work as a key binding and is passed through to the terminal.

On the other hand, if you do use this hotkey feature for multiple input languages, you can configure your own custom key binding in your settings.json file.

The text is blurry

Some display drivers and hardware combinations do not handle scroll and/or dirty regions without blurring the data from the previous frame. To mitigate this problem, you can add a combination of these global rendering settings to reduce the strain placed on your hardware caused by the terminal text renderer.

My colors look strange! There are black bars on my screen!

Important

This applies only to version 1.2+ of Windows Terminal. If you are seeing color issues in Windows Terminal 1.0 or 1.1, or issues that are not captured here, please file a bug.

Windows Terminal 1.2 and beyond has an improved understanding of certain application color settings. Because of this improved understanding, we have been able to remove a number of compatibility blocks that resulted in a poor user experience. Unfortunately, there is a small number of applications that may experience issues.

We will keep this troubleshooting item up-to-date with the list of known issues and their workarounds.

Black lines in PowerShell (5.1, 6.x, 7.0)

Terminal, when coupled with PowerShell's line editing library PSReadline, may draw black lines across the screen. These miscolored regions will extend across the screen beyond your prompt wherever there are command parameters, strings or operators.

PSReadline version 2.0.3 has been released and contains a fix for this issue. If you are using the prerelease version of PSReadline, note that a fix is not yet available.

To update to the newest version of PSReadline, please run the following command:

Why are my emojis not appearing as icons in the jumplist?

Only images linked from a file location can be rendered as profile icons in the jumplist. Emojis are not supported for jumplist icons.

Technical Notes

Applications that use the GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo family of APIs to retrieve the active console colors in Win32 format and then attempt to transform them into cross-platform VT sequences (for example, by transforming BACKGROUND_RED to x1b[41m) may interfere with Terminal's ability to detect what background color the application is attempting to use.

Application developers are encouraged to choose either Windows API functions or VT sequences for adjusting colors and not attempt to mix them.

Keyboard service warning

Starting in Windows Terminal 1.5, the Terminal will display a warning if the 'Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service' is disabled. This service is needed by the operating system to properly route input events to the Terminal application (as well as many other applications on Windows). If you see this warning, you can follow these steps to re-enable the service:

  1. In the run dialog, run services.msc
  1. Find the 'Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service'
  1. Open the 'Properties' for this service
  1. Change the 'startup type' to 'Automatic'
  1. Hit 'Ok', and restart the PC.

Install Terminal Services On Windows 10

After restarting the machine, the service should auto-start, and the dialog should no longer appear.