Microsoft Open-Sources Windows Terminal and the Console Host
Announced at Build 2019 and pushed to GitHub on May 3, 2019, Windows Terminal brought tabs and modern rendering to the Windows command line — while making both it and the underlying console host genuinely open source.
Windows Terminal was announced at Microsoft’s Build 2019 developer conference, with its source code appearing publicly on GitHub on May 3, 2019 — alongside the surprising additional news that the original Windows Console host itself, the decades-old component underlying cmd.exe, was being open-sourced too.
What Windows Terminal actually addressed
Windows’ traditional console host had gone years without significant modernization — no tabs, limited font rendering, weak Unicode support. Windows Terminal was built as a genuinely new, modern terminal application supporting multiple tabs and panes, GPU-accelerated text rendering, and proper Unicode/emoji support, designed to work equally well with Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL sessions side by side.
Why open-sourcing the legacy console host mattered too
The original console host had accumulated decades of undocumented behavior that huge amounts of existing software depended on — open-sourcing it let the community actually see and reason about that behavior directly, rather than treating it as an opaque legacy component Microsoft alone could touch. Combined with Windows Terminal’s own open development on GitHub, it signaled a broader shift in how Microsoft was willing to develop core Windows tooling: in the open, with public issue tracking and external contributions, rather than as closed, internally-developed components.
Tabs: the single most requested feature
Multiple tab support was, by Microsoft’s own account, the most frequently requested capability from users of the legacy console — a feature so basic to modern terminal emulators elsewhere that its absence had become one of the most visible gaps between the Windows command-line experience and Linux/macOS terminal applications.
Why this fit a broader pattern at Microsoft
Windows Terminal’s open-source release came during the same broader era as Windows Subsystem for Linux’s continued investment and Docker’s contemporaneous move to donate containerd to the CNCF — part of a sustained shift in how seriously Microsoft was investing in open-source tooling and Linux/developer-experience parity on Windows, rather than treating them as secondary concerns.
Sources: Introducing Windows Terminal — Windows Command Line Blog, Windows Terminal — Wikipedia, Open Source Windows Terminal and Linux Kernels for Windows Unveiled — Redmondmag