Windows Terminal 1.19 outs with web search, broadcast, emoji support

• Windows Terminal 1.18 is now available as a preview.
• This new version introduces Broadcast Input, Web Search, and Suggestions UI.
• The update also brings support for emojis and a slew of fixes and improvements.

On Windows 11, the “Windows Terminal” app is getting a new (preview) update that bumps the version number to “1.19” and brings new features, fixes, and improvements.

In version 1.19, the Windows Terminal introduces a new Broadcast Input feature. It’s now possible to perform web searches from the terminal. Also, the app finally adds support for emojis, and it can provide different types of text suggestions. This release also includes a bunch of fixes and other minor improvements.

Broadcast Input

Starting with version 1.19, it’s possible to broadcast the contents from one pane to all the other panes opened in the Windows Terminal. 

This feature can be enabled by selecting the “Toggle broadcast input to all panes” option from the Command Palette (Ctrl + Shift + P).

Web Search 

This update also adds a new entry in the right-click context menu to perform a web search on a selected text. When choosing the “Web Search” option, the default web browser will open with the result for the query. 

The feature will perform a Bing search by default, but you can use the "searchWebDefaultQueryUrl" in the settings.json file to specify another search engine. 

"searchWebDefaultQueryUrl": "https://www.google.com/search?q="

According to the official notes, the new search feature is also available as a webSearch action. You can customize this action to launch any search engine by specifying the queryUrl. %s will be replaced with your query.

Suggestions UI

The development team also revealed that this new version of the terminal can provide different types of text suggestions, including command history, saved commands, and more.

If you want to use this feature, you will also need to enable the Shell integration. After setting up the required feature, to use “Command History” in the Suggestions UI, you’ll have to create a new showSuggestions action that will show the Suggestions UI with your command history as its suggestions source.

"actions": 
    [
        {
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "showSuggestions",
                "source": "commandHistory",
                "useCommandline": true
            },
            "keys": "ctrl+h"
        }
    ],

To use “SendInput Actions” in the Suggestions UI to pull long commands with a single argument, you can use sendInput actions as a suggestions source. To enable the Suggestions UI to use your command history and your sendInput actions as a suggestions source, actions in your settings.json file should look like this.

{
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "showSuggestions",
                "source": "all",
                "useCommandline": true
            },
            "keys": "ctrl+y"
        },

You can refer to the below example to add some sendInput actions to the Suggestions UI:

"actions": 
    [
        {
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "showSuggestions",
                "source": "all",
                "useCommandline": true
            },
            "keys": "ctrl+y"
        },
        {
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "sendInput",
                "input": "git commit -m \"\"\u001b[D"
            },
            "name": "commit"
        },
        {
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "sendInput",
                "input": "git checkout -b"
            },
            "name": "new branch"
        },
        {
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "sendInput",
                "input": "git fetch & git pull\r"
            },
            "name": "fetch&pull"
        },
        {
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "sendInput",
                "input": "git merge origin/main\r"
            },
            "name": "merge main"
        },
        {
            "command": 
            {
                "action": "sendInput",
                "input": "git log -10 --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit\r"
            },
            "name": "log -10"
        }
    ],

In the Windows Terminal, you can also use Suggestions UI on PowerShell 7 to surface suggestions from Predictors, but it requires modifying the PowerShell profile with a shell completion protocol and adding extra settings on the settings.json. You can refer to this guide to set up this feature.

Other additions

The Windows Terminal 1.19 also includes support to input emojis on Command Prompt, and now, there’s support for unfocused acrylic, meaning that the application will appear with the acrylic effect when in the unfocused state instead of opaque.

You can use the "opacity" and "useAcrylic" options to control the effect in the settings.json file.

"opacity": 85,
"useAcrylic": true

Windows Terminal 1.19 is now available as a preview with the new features mentioned above and several bug fixes, and you can download it from the Microsoft Store or GitHub. If you are using the stable channel of the app, you can now update to version 1.18, which includes all these improvements.