This document outlines our roadmap to delivering Windows Terminal v1.0 by spring 2020.
## Milestones
The Windows Terminal project is engineered and delivered as a set of 4-week milestones:
| Duration | Activity | Releases |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 2 weeks | Dev Work<br/><ul><li>Fixes / Features for future Windows Releases</li><li>Fixes / Features for Windows Terminal</li></ul> | Release to Internal Selfhosters at end of week 2 |
| 1 week | Quality & Stability<br/><ul><li>Bug Fixes</li><li>Perf & Stability</li><li>UI Polish</li><li>Tests</li><li>etc.</li></ul>| Push to Microsoft Store at end of week 3 |
| 1 week | Release <br/><ul><li>Available from [Microsoft Store](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal-preview/9n0dx20hk701) & [GitHub Releases](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases) (Tues of 4th week)</li><li>Release Notes & Announcement Blog published</li><li>Engineering System Maintenance</li><li>Community Engagement</li><li>Docs</li><li>Future Milestone Planning</li></ul> | Release available from Microsoft Store & GitHub Releases |
## Terminal Roadmap / Timeline
Ultimately, we're aiming for Terminal v1.0 to be feature-complete by Dec 2019, and to declare v1.0 by April 2020:
> ⚠ Note: Terminal v1.0 will be a quality-oriented release driven in large part by the community. So, ___if you see bugs, find/file them___!
| 2019-07-09 | [v0.2 (update)](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases/tag/v0.2.1831.0) | First version of the Terminal released via the Microsoft Store, fundamental features in place, basic tab control, basic UI layout, config & settings via JSON file |
| [Terminal v1.0](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/milestone/6) | Work planned for v1.0, but not yet assigned to a milestone |
| [Terminal Backlog](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/milestone/7) | Work not yet assigned to a milestone or release |
## Issue Triage & Prioritization
Incoming issues/asks/etc. are triaged several times a week, labelled appropriately, and assigned to a milestone in priority order:
* P0 (serious crashes, data loss, etc.) issues are scheduled to be dealt with ASAP
* P1/2 issues/features/asks assigned to the current or future milestone, or to the [Terminal v1.0 milestone](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/milestone/6) for future assignment, if required to deliver a v1.0 feature
* Issues/features/asks not on our list of v1.0 features is assigned to the [Terminal Backlog](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/milestone/7) for subsequent triage, prioritization & scheduling.
> 👉 Note: There are many other features that don't fit within v1.0, but will be re-assessed and prioritized for v2.0, the plan for which will be published in early in 2020.
| V1 | 0 | Performance & Efficiency | Terminal shall be fast and efficient. Input latency should be eliminated wherever possible. Terminal will be very memory-efficient, and will avoid utilizing unnecessary dependencies to minimize memory consumption and disk footprint |
| V1 | 0 | Reliability | Every reasonable step should be taken to ensure that Terminal will not crash unexpectedly. Crashing is considered harmful to the user's well-being & state of mind. Crashing issues are prioritized Pri-0 by default |
| V1 | 0 | Code Reuse | Terminal's core engine will reuse & share componentry from within Windows Console wherever feasible to minimize support & maintenance costs for both|
| V1 | 0 | Terminal Reuse | Terminal's core will be hostable as a UWP (and perhaps WPF) Control so that apps can host/embed a high quality Terminal. This will satisfy a long-standing ask from many customers and partners for a hostable/embeddable Terminal Control. |
| V1 | 0 | Rich, modern text renderer | Terminal must be able to render glyphs from East Asian and Middle Asian languages, inc. Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. Terminal will also be able to render Emoji - an increasingly important feature considering that several programming languages now support Emoji in method and variable names! To render such glyphs, the Terminal needs a DirectWrite-based layout & rendering system which supports font fallback, customizable text layout, GPU accelerated rendering, and many other features not currently supported by the built-in Windows Console |
| V1 | 0 | Solid Unicode & UTF-8 support | Terminal must be able to store data encoded as Unicode UTF-16/UCS-2 and UTF-8, including surrogate pairs. Note: Terminal v1.0 won't be able to support composing characters or grapheme clusters that are not representable with a single unicode codepoint - this will be addressed in a subsequent release |
| V1 | 0 | International text rendering | The Terminal will support rendering text for almost every language for which there is a fixed-width font including East Asian languages. Bonus points for RTL languages/scripts. |
| V1 | 0 | Multiple instances | Users must be able to launch multiple independent instances of the Terminal in order to run tools side-by-side / independently |
| V1 | 0 | Elevation | Terminal can be launched "elevated" with Admin rights if required so that the user can perform operations that affect machine-wide state |
| V1 | 0 | Multiple Tabs per instance | Each Terminal instance must support one or more independent tabs. This is the #1 ask from the community! |
| V1 | 0 | Configurability & Customization | The new Terminal will have a modern, flexible settings mechanism that persists settings to/from a JSON file stored in the user's app data folders, and/or in files synchronized between machines via OneDrive, etc. There will be no settings UI in Terminal v1 - this is a feature for a future Terminal release. |
| V1 | 0 | Accessibility (A11y) | The Terminal will be highly accessible and inclusive. It will expose its contents via [UIA](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/ui-automation/ui-automation-overview) to support tools such as [Windows Narrator](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/22798/windows-10-complete-guide-to-narrator), and UI automation tools including [WinAppDriver](https://github.com/Microsoft/WinAppDriver) |
| V1 | 1 | Color Theming & Styling | The Terminal will honor the user's Windows dark/light theme settings, and/or color accent settings. Also, the Terminal background & text colors will be highly configurable, and importable/exportable via settings files.|
| V1 | 1 | Background transparency | Background transparency is a valuable feature for many command-line users. Terminal will (optionally) support transparent backgrounds, but without making the Terminal's text content itself transparent (like the Windows Console currently does due to GDI limitations)|
| V1 | 1 | Fluent "Acrylic" blurred backgrounds | While full transparency is valuable to some, clear/full-transparency can be distracting. Some would like blurred transparency similar to Fluent Acrylic |
| V1 | 1 | Customizable Key Bindings | Terminal will provide a way for users to customize key bindings, enabling them to configure specific key chords to particular Terminal actions |
| V1 | 1 | Mouse Support | Terminal will support mouse input, passing mouse movements and actions to command-line apps |
| V1 | 2 | Azure Cloud Shell | Enable users to register their Azure account/subscription, and allow the Terminal to enumerate and automatically configure a connection to the user's Cloud Shell |
| V1 | 2 | Multiple panes | Multiple tabs are useful to some, but developers often need to see several files/logs on the same screen at the same time. Windows Terminal should allow a "page" to be split into "panes", each running independent commands/shells/etc. similar to [tmux](https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ckuehl/tmux/) on *NIX/macOS |
