Midnight Commander now recognizes mouse input in Windows Terminal

Microsoft’s Windows Terminal is still a work in progress, but it keeps getting better with each new feature it receives.

Even before the update, the platform boasted a host of impressive capabilities, such as command line argument support.

Its latest version, Windows Terminal Preview v.010, introduces several functional enhancements and bug fixes.

The new features include:

Mouse input support within Windows Terminal

Mouse input support is one of the most significant upgrades the application has received. It is music to the ears of developers who have been struggling with this feature when working with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) apps.

Windows Terminal is barely a year old. But the developer community has been urging Microsoft to make it possible for the app to pass mouse events or sequences to WSL. The company has finally granted their wishes.

You can now select or click on items within the Terminal when working with command line tools that accept mouse input. Midnight Commander and tmux are perfect examples of WSL apps that require such functionality.

Also, the updated Terminal has got mouse support in Windows apps that use virtual terminal (VT) input.

That means you do not have to send VT input when making a selection. You can just hold down the Shift key to accomplish the same when your command line app is in mouse mode.

Duplicate panes

Windows Terminal now lets you quickly create duplicate panes with identical profiles, announced Microsoft. You may still divide the Terminal screen into more than two panes. This way, you can have multiple command prompts open in the same tab at the same time.

You can now open a new pane with a duplicate profile of the pane that is in focus. This can be done by adding “splitMode”: “duplicate” to the “splitPane” command list in your key bindings.

The ability to copy from a single pane already exists in tmux. That is why users of the command line tool are excited to explore that capability in the Windows Terminal.

Windows Terminal Preview v.010 brings a couple of bug fixes, including:

• Text reflows better when you resize the console window
• Dark theme no longer creates a white outline around the Terminal window
• Once you auto-hide the taskbar, you can access it with the Terminal maximized by hovering your mouse over the bottom of the display
• Azure Cloud Shell now supports mouse input and PowerShell
• The update fixed abnormal touchpad and touchscreen scrolling