Windows Terminal
Hacker ApprovedRanked 7 of 40 terminal emulators by recommenders
Recommended as a capable tabbed terminal for Windows and WSL that has improved, with good font rendering. Common caveat: early versions were slow, and advanced settings need hand-edited config.
Recommended as a capable tabbed terminal for Windows and WSL that has improved, with good font rendering. Common caveat: early versions were slow, and advanced settings need hand-edited config.
72 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 48
- criticize it
- 24
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 48 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Tabs, panes and tiling
“Even windows ships with a half-decent terminal with tabs and multiple panes by default now!”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Mitchellh starts a new company: Superlogical” “the Windows Terminal solves most of those, and includes tabs and other useful features”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system” “Same with windows terminal, and you can use either of those to have tiling.”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Agent-Manager: A Tmux TUI for Running Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode” - Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”
Much better than before
“is kinda good actually. It’s not Alacritty, but a lot better than any previous terminal emulator”
Comment from 22 Oct 2026 in “I can't believe PowerShell is good” “WT ranks a lot higher than a wide breadth of terminal emulators on linux now”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions” “it was really a massive step up I did not expect after all of these years”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)” - Comment from 10 Nov 2025 in “Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control”
- Comment from 10 Sep 2026 in “Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft”
Works well with WSL
“WSL and Windows Terminal has done a fantastic job at delaying my move to Linux as my primary desktop”
Comment from 10 Jan 2026 in “I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great” “the only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the Windows Terminal and WSL”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products” “Development experience using Windows Terminal + WSL has been pretty great”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)” - Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)”
Good font rendering
“WinTerm has full VT and ANSI support, much better font rendering”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “Why TUIs Are Back” “I particularly love its fonts (but that's probably just me)”
Comment from 10 Sep 2026 in “Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow performance and latency
“Casey Muratori told them that Windows Terminal sucked and they should be able to write one that goes at 60fps easy”
Comment from 23 Mar 2026 in “Our Commitment to Windows Quality” “Years later there are still blog articles being written about the performance issues of the Windows Terminal.”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console vs. Graphical Rendering” “the new Windows Terminal had horrendous performance when it first came out”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours” - Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”
- Comment from 29 Mar 2026 in “LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs”
- Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)”
Seen as basic and overhyped
“Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux” “followed by Casey producing evidence for his 'extremely simple' claim in couple of days.”
Comment from 10 Feb 2026 in “Another GitHub outage in the same day” “An LLM, a decent prompter, and a weekend could certainly out perform Windows Terminal.”
Comment from 26 Oct 2026 in “Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce” - Comment from 18 Dec 2025 in “Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles”
Input and crash bugs
“Using Windows Terminal Version: 1.24.10921.0, characters are doubled on input.”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: A terminal spreadsheet editor with Vim keybindings” “Windows Terminal users constantly had problems because WT is ... not great.”
Comment from 2 Oct 2026 in “Pi 1.0” “it somehow tends to crash the processes running inside its tabs”
Comment from 22 Oct 2026 in “I can't believe PowerShell is good”
Other terminal emulators people recommend
The four most recommended other terminal emulators, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ghostty | 401 | 158 | 72% | 12 | 3 mo22 owners | Approved |
| Termux | 188 | 31 | 86% | 12 | 1 yr6 owners | Approved |
| iTerm2 | 95 | 69 | 58% | 12 | 10 yrs4 owners | — |
| Warp terminal | 84 | 86 | 49% | 11 | 1 yr5 owners | — |
| Windows TerminalThis page | 48 | 24 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 81 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Windows Terminal can execute your commands in less than a weekend”
“An LLM, a decent prompter, and a weekend could certainly out perform Windows Terminal.”
“it somehow tends to crash the processes running inside its tabs”
“is kinda good actually. It’s not Alacritty, but a lot better than any previous terminal emulator”
“Windows Terminal users constantly had problems because WT is ... not great.”
“they did essentially wind up with the architecture he proposed”
“Terminal is much, much faster than it was.”
“I particularly love its fonts (but that's probably just me)”
“the new Windows Terminal had horrendous performance when it first came out”
“Same with windows terminal, and you can use either of those to have tiling.”
“Even windows ships with a half-decent terminal with tabs and multiple panes by default now!”
“the Windows Terminal solves most of those, and includes tabs and other useful features”
“The command line team has been doing some solid work for a while.”
“WinTerm has full VT and ANSI support, much better font rendering”
“These are quite capable applications able to render good, complex text-based interfaces.”
“I'd say Windows Terminal is still pretty close to decent”
“Using Windows Terminal Version: 1.24.10921.0, characters are doubled on input.”
“you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal”
“Casey Muratori told them that Windows Terminal sucked and they should be able to write one that goes at 60fps easy”
“WSL, terminal, .NET core) you helped give me the tools to get OFF of windows”
“followed by Casey producing evidence for his 'extremely simple' claim in couple of days.”
“Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me”
“I'm glad Microsoft invested more in the CLI with Windows Terminal”
“WSL and Windows Terminal has done a fantastic job at delaying my move to Linux as my primary desktop”
“Some of the beloved Microsoft late programs like Windows Terminal are written in it.”
“with things like WSL, winget, terminal, storage spaces, fancyzones”
“The Microsoft Terminal had no issues with the same Neovim version and configs”
“Casey reimplemented terminal, it was not that hard.”
“the only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the Windows Terminal and WSL”
“several orders of magnitude faster than Windows Terminal”
“it was really a massive step up I did not expect after all of these years”
“Years later there are still blog articles being written about the performance issues of the Windows Terminal.”
“windows Terminal + WSL at least makes development bearable.”
“Development experience using Windows Terminal + WSL has been pretty great”
“Windows terminal was not very good back then but now it is OK.”
“Windows terminal with true color , possibly with tmux, is very slow.”
“This is genious. It is one of the most annoying things remaining in the Linux desktop”
“It handles tabs, theming and renaming of windows so well.”
“I love the easter egg with the names of the developers across the Windows timeline”
“WT ranks a lot higher than a wide breadth of terminal emulators on linux now”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.