This free terminal app is the first thing I install on every new PC, and I can’t work without it

I have set up at least fifteen Windows machines for friends, family, and one extremely patient neighbor over the last three years. On every single one of them, the first thing I do after the desktop loads is the same thing: open a browser, download Windows Terminal, then install a tabbed shell environment (a setup that gives you a text interface for talking to your computer) that turns the default Command Prompt into something I actually want to use. I have been doing this so long that I forget it is not the default. New users do not know what they are missing.

The app in question is the open-source terminal project that has eaten the rest of the category. You can use it to launch any command-line tool, split the window into panes, run multiple shells at once, and configure everything from a single JSON file. It is free, signed by Microsoft, and ships through the Microsoft Store. It is also available as a portable build that you can drop on a USB stick and use on any Windows machine without installing anything.

This is not a love letter to a terminal emulator. It is a love letter to the workflow you can build on top of one.

What it actually does

The terminal ships with a clean, modern interface that is fully Unicode-aware, so emoji and box-drawing characters render properly. It supports multiple shells side by side: PowerShell, Command Prompt, WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux, the feature that runs a real Linux distro inside Windows), Azure Cloud Shell, and any custom shell you point it at. The killer feature, for me, is the split pane. Hit Alt+Shift+D and your single window becomes two horizontal panes. Add another with Alt+Shift+Plus and you have four. You can drag to resize, click to focus, and run a different shell in each.

Configuration lives in a single JSON file at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json. Edit it in any text editor, save, and the terminal picks up the change on next launch. No restart of the OS. No reboot. The schema is documented, the file is human-readable, and you can version it in git alongside your dotfiles (small configuration files that travel with you between machines).

I keep three custom profiles: a default PowerShell 7, an Ubuntu WSL distro, and a remote SSH session into my home server. I can switch between them with Ctrl+Tab. The remote session runs through OpenSSH (a widely used secure-shell client) that ships with Windows 10 and 11, so there is nothing to install on top of the terminal itself.

Why it matters for new users

Most Windows users never touch the command line. They have been told it is for sysadmins and developers, that it is dangerous, that they will break something. The terminal fixes that image problem in a single install. It looks like a normal app. It opens in a normal window. It has tabs. It has a settings UI for people who do not want to touch JSON.

For a beginner, the experience is closer to a web browser than to the old cmd.exe black box. You can right-click in the title bar to open a new tab, drag tabs between windows, and customize the color scheme from a gallery of presets. The Cascadia Code font that ships with the terminal is monospaced (every character takes the same horizontal width, which keeps columns aligned), supports programming ligatures (where the source code editor combines two or three characters like >= into a single glyph for readability), and renders cleanly on high-DPI screens (displays with very high pixel density, like 4K monitors).

When I set up my mother’s laptop last Christmas, I installed the terminal, added a “Backup my files” PowerShell profile, and pinned a shortcut to it in the taskbar. She has not opened the regular Command Prompt since. The terminal feels like a real application, not a developer toy.

The catch

There is one thing that bites everyone the first time: the default shell on most systems is still PowerShell 5, the legacy version that ships with Windows 10. It works, but it does not have the cross-platform features of PowerShell 7. The terminal will let you set PowerShell 7 as the default with a checkbox in the settings UI, but the checkbox only appears if PowerShell 7 is actually installed. Most users never install it.

Install it once with winget install Microsoft.PowerShell and the terminal starts picking it up automatically. winget is the Windows package manager, a command-line tool that lets you install, update, and remove software the same way apt works on Ubuntu. From there, you can use the terminal to install other tools without ever opening a web browser. The whole loop closes.

Another small downside: the terminal does not bundle a real terminal multiplexer (a tool that lets you save and restore your terminal sessions across disconnects) the way tmux does on Linux. There is a community extension called windows-terminal-tmux that fills the gap, but it is a third-party add-on, not a first-party feature. If you live in long-running remote sessions, plan to install something extra.

What I would tell past me

If I could send a message back to the version of me that set up my first Windows machine in 2019, I would say four things.

• Install the terminal first, before anything else. Even before your favorite browser. The terminal is a faster way to install everything else, and you will need it the moment you have to debug a problem that does not have a GUI.
• Set PowerShell 7 as the default shell before you do anything else. The two minutes of setup saves hours of “why does this command not work” later.
• Edit the settings file in your text editor, not the GUI. The GUI is fine for a quick change. For anything serious, the JSON is faster and version-controllable.
• Pin a shortcut to the terminal in the taskbar on day one. You will open it fifty times a day. Make the path one click long.

Trade-offs

The terminal is not for everyone. If you are happy with the Command Prompt and have no use for tabs, panes, or WSL, you do not need it. It is also a Microsoft Store app, which means it updates through the Store and not through winget. If you prefer to manage every byte of installed software through a single package manager, that is friction.

For the people I have set up machines for, the trade-off has been positive. They get a real command line that does not scare them, a single place to find every shell they might want to use, and a config file they can back up and restore. I have helped two people migrate to a new laptop by copying settings.json to a USB stick and dropping it in the same folder on the new machine. The whole process took about two minutes.

The bigger trade-off is philosophical. The terminal trains you to think in commands. That is a good thing if you are learning how computers work. It is a bad thing if you are happy with point-and-click. Pick the one that fits.

Bottom line

If you set up Windows machines for other people, install the terminal first. If you are the person whose Windows machine is being set up, ask for the terminal. It is free, it is signed by Microsoft, and it is the fastest way to turn the default Windows command line into something you actually want to use. I have been doing this for three years, and I have no plans to stop.