Windows Terminal gets smart AI features thanks to GitHub Copilot

Mostly a developer event, Build has long been Microsoft’s focus on consumer-focused updates to Windows. The company is taking a different approach this year, highlighting its work to improve the developer experience on Windows. Obviously we’re talking big updates here, and they’re all coming to the Windows Insider developer channel this week.

During the event, Microsoft announced that they will add an artificial intelligence chatbot to the Windows Terminal application. “GitHub Copilot users will be able to leverage natural language AI to suggest commands, describe errors, and take actions within the Terminal app, both inline and in an experimental chat experience,” Windows chief Panos Panay said in a developer blog post today.

GitHub Copilot X support in Windows Terminal

Microsoft first announced Windows Terminal at Build in 2019, surprising the developers. It became a popular tool in Windows 10, and Microsoft finally made it the default Windows 11 command line experience last year. Developers now see Windows Terminal when they try to launch Command Prompt, and Microsoft has been gradually adding new features to Windows Terminal over the past few years. The Windows Terminal app includes multi-tab support, colorful themes, customization options, and full GPU-based text rendering and emoji support.

Microsoft says it’s now experimenting with GitHub Copilot AI in other developer tools, too, like its WinDbg debugger. WinDbg is often used by developers to debug user-mode applications, device drivers and even Windows itself. Thanks to its ability to analyze memory dumps produced by Windows, we can say that it is a popular tool for IT administrators to troubleshoot blue screen (BSOD) errors. In addition to Windows Terminal innovations, new Dev Home and Dev Drive features have also been announced.

If you are interested in trying out the Windows Terminal or future WinDbg experiments with AI, you must be a GitHub Copilot Chat user to access.

Dev Home and Dev Drive

However, Microsoft is rolling out Dev Home, a new extensible open source Windows application that allows users to quickly set up their machines, connect to code repositories, and add widgets to monitor their projects or monitor the performance of their local machines. Microsoft is also launching Dev Drive, a new storage type for Windows 11 that promises up to 30 percent performance improvements in compile times, based on the company’s Flexible File System for Azure.